Verification Email will not send due to errors caused by Docker filesystem

installation
1

I have a Linode with Gentoo Linux that I decided to install Discourse on.
I installed Docker and then using the 30-min install options installed discourse.
This part worked as I can go to the site and register my admin user but after registering, I never get a Verification Email.
I configured Discourse via nano -w containers/app.yml with ./launcher bootstrap app after editing it.
I signed up with Mailjet to do email and got an API Key and Secret key to use.

To show examples without revealing those, Iā€™ll use these:

  • API Key: hotdog
  • Secret Key: ketchup
  • Dev Email: justin@mydomain.tld
  • Hostname: forum.mydomain.tld

Here is my app.yml configuration:

DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS: 'justin@mydomain.tld'
DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME: 'forum.mydomain.tld'
DISCOURSE_SMTP_ADDRESS: in-v3.mailjet.com
DISCOURSE_SMTP_DOMAIN: mydomain.tld
DISCOURSE_SMTP_USER_NAME: hotdog
DISCOURSE_SMTP_PASSWORD: ketchup

I have tried using using these options (separately and together) also without any effect:

DISCOURSE_SMTP_PORT: 587`
DISCOURSE_SMTP_ENABLE_START_TLS: false

After looking at this topic, I copied an example python script and edited itā€™s configuration to be:

SMTPserver = 'in-v3.mailjet.com'
sender =     'forum@mydomain.tld'
destination = ['justin@mydomain.tld']
USERNAME = "hotdog"
PASSWORD = "ketchup"

The python script worked just fine so I know the Mailjet account works.
No idea why Discourse canā€™t send email.

Are there any logs I can look at to figure out why Discourse wonā€™t send email?
Iā€™ve looked in shared/standalone/log/rails/production.log but all I find about email is various entries of this (with different ms values):

Sent mail to justin@mydomain.tld (30058.0ms)
Job exception: execution expired
2 Likes
2

See the email troubleshooting howto, and list your response to every section of that topic.

3

Did you fill in the SMTP address, SMTP username, and SMTP password fields correctly, as specified by Mandrill?
Yes (for Mailjet).

Make sure you copy and paste the Mandrill password ā€“ do not type it in manually.
I did do this (with MailJet).

Does the value for DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS correctly have one set of single quotes around it ā€˜like thisā€™?
Yes

Are the values aligned with the correct indentation for the email section? YML files are alignment sensitive. Even one extra space at the beginning of a line will cause problems.
I believe so, I didnā€™t change the alignment that was there.

Did you remove the YML comment marker # in front of the lines?
Yes

Is Digital Ocean blocking your email?
I donā€™t use Digital Ocean, so no.
And Linode is fine with email that isnā€™t spam.

Is Mandrill blocking your email?
I use MailJet so no, also because I could use the expample python script to send email, I know they arenā€™t blocking email.

Did you properly set up DKIM and SPF records for your domain?
Yes I did.

4

You didnā€™t quite answer all the questions. Do MailJet logs show an attempt to connect and send email from the IP of the linode? Digital Ocean will show a connection attempt from the Digital Ocean IP in its web UI for email logs.

Looks like something in your network, somewhere, is blocking connections based on

Sent mail to justin@mydomain.tld (30058.0ms)
Job exception: execution expired

You can look at /logs URL in Discourse but you need an admin account to do that.

5

I donā€™t see anywhere in MailJet logs of connect attempts.
Just a ā€œReal-time Email Feedā€ showing 1 email sent via the python test script (Running on the Linode).

In theory it seems like there shouldnā€™t be a difference between a connection from a python script or a ruby on rails script (which is what the discourse mail code is if I understand correctly) in a docker container.

Why canā€™t I look at those logs via the command line like most other logs?

6

Because they are served via the web browser. Sorry, if you want, buy a $99 install and I will set up email for you thatā€™s guaranteed to work with a Digital Ocean Discourse droplet, using a secret Mandrill reseller code that provides a large number of free emails per month.

http://discourse.org/buy

Email is the hardest problem in computer science.

2 Likes
7

Is there a way to manually set the user as verified just to check the logs (I wouldnā€™t leave it that way as itā€™s a good idea to verify peopleā€™s email addresses)?

At the moment, I donā€™t want to spend any more money then Iā€™m spending on the Linode hosting for my WordPress site/blog along with other small traffic sites (which run using apache port 80 so for now I have discourse set to use port 8080)

I canā€™t tell if you are being serious or not.

8

Jeff is serious. A subjective opinion but not far off, if at all.

The alternative is to spend more time. Up to you.

1 Like
9

There are howto topics here on creating an admin account manually at the command line, then you can get to /logs in the web browser.

But without functional email you are 100% screwed since nobody will be able to sign up and use your Discourse.

10

If I kept it that way, yes.
The idea was to login, check /logs, find and fix the problem so there would be functional email for all future accounts Verifications.

11

Ok, I created the admin account manually and looked at /logs
First Error:
PG::UndefinedTable: ERROR: relation "users" does not exist LINE 5: WHERE a.attrelid = '"users"'::regclass ^ : SELECT a.attname, format_type(a.atttypid, a.atttypmod), pg_get_expr(d.adbin, d.adrelid), a.attnotnull, a.atttypid, a.atttypmod FROM pg_attribute a LEFT JOIN pg_attrdef d ON a.attrelid = d.adrelid AND a.attnum = d.adnum WHERE a.attrelid = '"users"'::regclass AND a.attnum > 0 AND NOT a.attisdropped ORDER BY a.attnum
Iā€™m not sure what this means.

Second Error:
Job exception: execution expired
This is related to the email but doesnā€™t seem to have much more detail than production.log did.

12

Are you on the latest version of Discourse? Any plugins or unusual site settings?

13

I followed the instructions at https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md for the most part.
Here are the exact steps I did:
* Set up Swap (if needed)
Because of ā€˜If youā€™re using 2 GB+ memory, you can probably get by without a swap file.ā€™, I figured I didnā€™t need one so I didnā€™t set one up.
Edit:
Checking with free -m it returns a Memory total of 1999 so this could be part of the problem as that says 2GB+ not 2GB (which would be 2048 MB so it seems Iā€™m 49MB short of that).
* Install Docker / Git
I skipped running the command wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh as I figured for Gentoo the packages app-emulation/docker and dev-vcs/git covered it.
* Install Discourse
I ran the listed commands:
mkdir /var/discourse git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse cd /var/discourse cp samples/standalone.yml containers/app.yml
Which appeared to complete successfully.
* Edit Discourse Configuration
I edited containers/app.yml with nano as listed in my first post.
* Bootstrap Discourse
Ran ./launcher bootstrap app
Than ran ./launcher start app
* Register New Account and Become Admin
I was able to do this except of course for the email validation
So I havenā€™t really been able to add plugins or change site settings.
I can now with the manual admin user creation but without working email, not much point in changing other things yet.

Edit:
I did end up doing these steps twice because the first time docker used the vfs storage driver and ran out of space so I wiped out /var/lib/docker, told docker to use overlayfs and restarted it.
I also ended up wiping out /var/discourse incase something was wrong there.

14

What does docker --info return and docker --version ?

15

It appears the ā€“ prefix is not used in newer docker versions so I ran the commands without it.

The command docker info returns:

Containers: 1
Images: 11
Storage Driver: overlay
 Backing Filesystem: extfs
Execution Driver: native-0.2
Logging Driver: json-file
Kernel Version: 4.1.5-x86_64-linode61
Operating System: Gentoo/Linux
CPUs: 2
Total Memory: 1.952 GiB
Name: linodevps
ID: 2C7H:MOAS:GM2N:JMG7:GYY5:CNNF:R33M:QNKK:3U6K:2N27:OOAU:PZRG
WARNING: No swap limit support

The command docker version returns:

Client:
 Version:      1.8.1
 API version:  1.20
 Go version:   go1.4.2
 Git commit:   d12ea79
 Built:
 OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

Server:
 Version:      1.8.1
 API version:  1.20
 Go version:   go1.4.2
 Git commit:   d12ea79
 Built:
 OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

Also, in case it matters, when merging the docker package the following notice appeared:

 * Checking for suitable kernel configuration options...
 *   CONFIG_MEMCG_KMEM: is optional
 *   CONFIG_MEMCG_SWAP: is required if you wish to limit swap usage of containers
 *   CONFIG_MEMCG_SWAP_ENABLED:  is not set when it should be.
 *   CONFIG_CGROUP_HUGETLB:      is not set when it should be.
 *   CONFIG_RT_GROUP_SCHED:      is not set when it should be.
16

Is overlay safe to use now @sam ? If you are on latest 1.4 beta Discourse code, I cannot explain the errors you are seeing. But last I recall overlay was new and experimental and could potentially cause unknown issues.

17

I have been using overlay locally for about 3 months with no issues

1 Like
18

Logged in to Discourse with the manual admin user I created and it shows the installed version being ā€œv1.4.0.beta10 +176ā€.

19

I think you have a busted install, somehow. If you donā€™t have any plugins or any other unusual settings, I canā€™t think of any reason you would have strange errors related to email.

I just set up two instances today following the guide literally step by step on Digital Ocean with Mandrill, and everything worked perfectly.

20

Itā€™s probably that overlayfs is still broken, maybe itā€™s more broken on Linode than it is on @samā€™s laptop?

Actually sam probably has a newer kernel version. @jd2066 does Linode let you pick a newer kernel?