Discourse Operations

Discourse is an open source forum, available at [http://discourse.org].

Running

Stop the Discourse app:

/var/discourse/launcher stop app

Start the Discourse app:

/var/discourse/launcher start app

Monitoring

Interesting logs in:

/var/discourse/shared/standalone/log/rails/production.log

Installing

Install Docker

Create a new small AWS instance. 2GB memory is plenty, but needs 16GB of disk.

Create an elastic IP. Associate it with the instance.

Create a DNS record to the elastic IP.

sudo yum install -y docker
sudo service docker start

Add the ec2-user user to the docker group.

sudo usermod -a -G docker ec2-user

Log out and in again to get the new group.

Test the ability to run docker without root.

docker info

Install Discourse

sudo mkdir /var/discourse
sudo yum install -y git
sudo git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse

Configure Discourse

sudo -i
cd /var/discourse
./discourse-setup

Discourse is configured with /var/discourse/containers/app.yml.

SSL keys go in /var/discourse/shared/standalone/ssl.