vcmi/docs/maintainers/Discourse.md

Discourse

• RAM requirements: ~1.5 GB.
• CPU requirements: 1 core
• SSD requirements: ~20 GB. May be more over time

Accessible as forum.vcmi.eu

Admin access:

• Ivan Savenko
• AVS
• SXX
• Warmonger

Additional accounts can be given admin rights via admin panel. Or, if none are available - directly via server console (requires root access to server)

Configuration

• Located at /var/discourse.
• Configuration file is at /var/discourse/containers/app.yml
• For administration typical approach is cd /var/discourse; ./launcher enter app. However most commands are also available in web UI
• To apply configuration changes, cd /var/discourse; ./launcher rebuild app. WARNING: this will also perform update of Discourse itself!

Setup

References:

• official docs:
• nginx multi-server configuration

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/discourse/discourse_docker/main/install-discourse | sudo bash

Configure Discourse to run through nginx outside of container, to allow multiple sites to be hosted on same server.

1. Install nginx
2. Edit configuration at /var/discourse/containers/app.yml:
3. Configure nginx server
4. Rebuild app and restart nginx

Modified configuration file:

  - "templates/postgres.template.yml"
  - "templates/redis.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.ratelimited.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.socketed.template.yml"  # <-- Added
#   - "templates/web.ssl.template.yml" # remove - https will be handled by outer nginx
#   - "templates/web.letsencrypt.ssl.template.yml" # remove -- https will be handled by outer nginx
# expose: # comment out entire section by putting a # in front of each line
# - "80:80"   # http
# - "443:443" # https  

Approximate order of commands:

cd /var/discourse
apt install nginx
nano containers/app.yml

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
cp default forum.vcmi.eu
cd ../sites-enabled
ln -s ../sites-available/forum.vcmi.eu

./launcher rebuild app
sudo service nginx reload

Upgrade

cd /var/discourse
./launcher rebuild app

Alternatively can be done in UI, but untested

Migration

When setting up Discourse, it needs to be already located on target domain name, so it might be a good idea to do operations in following order:

• create backup on old server (or pick latest weekly backup)
• switch domain name to new IP & wait for DNS to propagate
• ensure that ports 80 and 443 are open on new server
• setup Discourse on new server
• restore backup either in web interface or in console on new server
• adjust or migrate configuration file from old server to new one