Thinking of trying self-hosted and have some questions

Installation
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I’m looking at the official instructions to self-host and I have some questions:

1 - If I use DigitalOcean, what would I need for a new and small community, from this page? I believe that Droplets is required, but what else? Would like to have an idea of what costs I would have? What would be my real monthly cost for now?

2 - When it’s said Connect to your server via its IP address using SSH, how can I do this? I just asked ChatGPT and Claude about this, and I got the same answer from both: I can use Terminal on my Mac to run the commands:

sudo apt install docker.io
sudo apt install git

sudo -s
git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse
cd /var/discourse
chmod 700 containers

./discourse-setup

Can you confirm their answer?

I have some basic knowledge when it comes to certain aspects of the installation, and I’m sure that with some research and contacting each company will help me, but I’m not an expert.

Basically, looking at the expenses and limitations of a managed hosting, I could use that same amount of money I would pay in a month, to “play around” with a self-hosted option maybe for 2 months, and see how far I can go with installing Discourse myself and then everything else such as installing plugins, maintenance, etc. By the end of that “trial period”, I could either decide to stick to self-hosted or realize it’s too much for me and start a plan in a managed hosting solution.

Any tips and help are appreciated :raising_hands:

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   ssh ipaddress

You would create the droplet and connect to it with ssh and then do those commands on the droplet, not on your Mac.

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So that would be done inside my DigitalOcean account? Is that what you are saying?
I would never do anything locally?

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The only thing local is your terminal app so you can ssh into your VPS.

There’s a great native one on MacOS and on Windows the Microsoft “terminal app” is really good.

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you should also factor in the monthly cost of a transactional email service (like Mailgun, for example). you need email service.

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I don’t know if you misunderstood my question, but yesterday I was able to install everything and yes, I did everything on my Mac. I used Terminal to run those commands.
Not sure if that’s what you meant or not?

Anyway, it’s installed and running :slight_smile:

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Yes, that’s what I meant. I didn’t know if those commands were ran locally on my computer via Terminal or inside my DigitalOcean account (browser), for example.

But everything is installed now, so it worked as expected. Thanks for the info.

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Yes, I’m using Brevo. It seemed to be the most cost effective of all the options suggested.

I was trying to understand the costs just related to DigitalOcean, because when I asked ChatGPT more info about it, it recommended more (optional) things and I wanted to make sure I could get away with just Droplets for now.

Since the documentation only mentions Droplets as required, and everything is working now on my new installation, I guess that’s what I need to at least have it running. With time I will explore other options that can enhance the whole process.

Thank you for your feedback.

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I think it was sort of a misunderstanding of both due to how things work.

You are typing in your mac terminal, which is connected to your server… Which means you’re also typing in your server’s console.

But the mac terminal here is just a tool. In reality, your commands only run on your server.

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Yes, after replying I started thinking about that as well.
The tool is local (Terminal), but the changes are made remotely.
And my original question was about the tool itself: my computer using Terminal or using the browser (which in a way is also local haha).

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