What else do I need to take care of when self hosting?

[Rachit_Pandey]

Continuing the discussion from Recommended Hosting Providers for Self Hosters :

What about mails and plugins in case of a self hosted solution?
How do I get plugins if I self host myself.
Obviously I’ll have to look after the mail integration as well, right?

What else will I have to take care of?

[merefield (Robert)]

@Rachit_Pandey

How do I get plugins if I self host myself.

Install Plugins in Discourse

This guide assumes that you have a self-hosted standard installation. We only support the standard method of install here, so these instructions assume you have a standard install. This guide only applies to self-hosted Discourse instances. If you are using a managed hosting service, the available plugins are controlled by your hosting provider. For example, on our hosting these specific plugins are available by hosting tier. In this tutorial, we’ll install the Discours…

Most plugins worth their salt are in #plugin (non-functioning, broken plugins are moved to the sub-cateogry)

@Rachit_Pandey

Obviously I’ll have to look after the mail integration as well, right?

Yes, see: discourse/INSTALL-email.md at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub

@Rachit_Pandey

What else will I have to take care of?

• Backups:

Configure automatic backups for Discourse

So you’d like to automatically back up all your Discourse data every day? Go to the /admin settings, backup, and set backup_frequency to 1. [image] Now backup will be taken every day. Store backups on local server or Amazon S3 WARNING Storing backups and regular uploads in the same bucket and folder is no longer supported and will not work. By default backups are stored on the local server disk. In order to store backups on Amazon S3, you’ll need to create a unique, private …

• Upgrades (suggest once a month) from either ssh command line or Docker Manager screen via Dashboard.

[osioke (Osioke Itseuwa)]

And to add to Robert’s already detailed reply, you’ll also need to take care troubleshooting your Discourse instance and getting support from the community. Search, #support and #installation are very useful for this.

But if you follow the official install guide, you know your way around a server and are a seasoned Discourse user, then self-hosting is a very good option.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

I’ve had a frightening number of people do absolutely nothing and not come back to me for years after I’ve done an installation wanting an upgrade. I don’t recommend that.

If you push backups to S3 and have that configuration in your yml file, then the yml file is all you need to recover from a catastrophy.

Mostly you can do upgrades from the web interface, but about 3x/year you need to do a command line upgrade, which is usually as simple as ./launcher rebuild app. Sometimes, it’s a bit more complicated. I offer a service where I do those upgrades when they are required, but I suspect you don’t need that.