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Overview

Copyright 2013 by Christopher Baus [email protected]. Licensed under GPL 1.3

Discourse is the new web discussion forum software by Jeff Atwood (et al.). Considering the state of forum software, I'm confident it is going to be a success. With that said it is still in a very early state, and if you are not an expert on Linux and Rail administration, getting a Discourse site up and running can be a daunting task. I hope this helps make it a bit easier.

Warning

Not only is Discourse new software, these instructions have been pulled together after a couple days of research. Use at your own risk.

Install on a DigitalOcean VPS using Ubuntu 12.10x64

DigitalOcean is offering very inexpensive VPS hosts based on SSDs.

Provision your server

While I'm a long time RedHat and CentOS user, I've recently made the move to Ubuntu, primarily because they offer more up-to-date packages. With a project as cutting edge as Discourse, this makes installation easier as it prevents having to download packages from source and install them, so my instructions use Ubuntu 12.10 x64 server (note:with small RAM amounts, a 32bit image would probably work as well, but I'm standardizing on 64bit images).

After creating your account at DigitalOcean, create a Droplet with at least 1GB of RAM [1], and select the Ubuntu
OS image you want to use. DigitalOcean will email the root password to you.

[1] A minimum of 1GB of RAM is required to compile assets for production.

Login to your server

If you are using OS X or Linux, fire up a terminal ssh to your new server which be at the IP address that DigitialOcean has provided. Windows users should consider installing Putty to access your new server.

# From your local shell
~$ ssh root@<ip_addr>
# Enter your root password

Change your root password

Since your password has been emailed to you in clear text, you should immediately change your password for security reasons.

root@host:~# passwd
# # Enter your new password

Create a user account

It is bad practice to admin your system from the root account. Create an administrative account, and add it to the sudo group, so the account can make system changes with the sudo command. In this case, I'm going to call the new users "admin."

root@host:~# adduser admin
root@host:~# adduser admin sudo

Logout and log back in using the admin account

root@host:~# logout
# now back at the local terminal prompt
~$ ssh admin@<ip_addr>

Use apt-get to install core system dependencies

The apt-get command is used to add packages to Ubuntu (and all Debian based Linux distributions). DigitalOcean, like many VPS's, ships with a limited Ubuntu configuration, so you will have to install many of the software the dependencies yourself.

To install system packages, you have to have root privledges. Since the admin account is part of the sudo group, the admin account can run commands with root privledges by using the sudo command. Just prepend sudo to any commands you want to run as root. This includes apt-get commands to install packages.

# Install required packages
# Note: This installs redis 2.4. 
# Discourse explicitly states that they require Redis 2.6. This should be addressed, 
# and requires building Redis from source.
admin@host:~$ sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1 postgresql-contrib-9.1 make g++ \
libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libpq-dev ruby1.9.3 git redis-server nginx postfix
# Install the Bundler app which installs Rails dependencies
admin@host:~$ sudo gem install bundler
admin@host:~$ sudo gem install therubyracer

Configure Postgres user account

Discourse uses the Postgres database to store forum data. The configuration procedure is similar to MySQL, but I am a Postgres newbie, so if you have improvements to this aspect of the installation procedure, please let me know.

Note: this is the easiest way to setup the Postgres server, but it also creates a highly privledged Postgres user account. Future revisions of this document may offer alternatives for creating the Postgres DBs, which would allow Discourse to login to Postgres as a user with lower privledges.

admin@host:~$ sudo -u postgres createuser admin -s -P

Pull and configure the latest version of the Discourse app

Now we are ready install the actual Discourse application. Note this step shows how to pull the latest version of the Discourse application from the main development branch. At this point, there a lot of changes occuring in this branch, so changes may occur at ANY time.

# Pull the latest version from github.
admin@host:~$ git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse.git
admin@host:~$ cd discourse
# Now install the application dependencies using bundle
admin@host:~$ bundle install

Set Discourse application settings

Now you have set the Discourse application settings. The configuration files are in a directory called "config" There are sample configuration files now included in the master branch, so you need to copy these files and modify them with your own changes.

admin@host:~$ cd ~/discourse/config
admin@host:~$ cp ./database.yml.sample ./database.yml
admin@host:~$ cp ./redis.yml.sample ./redis.yml

Now you need to edit the configuration files and apply your own settings. To do this you should use your favorite text editor. Vi is installed by default, but I like emacs, so I installed it with:

admin@host:~$ sudo apt-get install emacs

Start by editing the database configuration file which should be now located at ~/discourse/config/database.yml

admin@host:~$ vi ~/discourse/config/database.yml

Edit the file to add your Postgres username and password to each configuration in the file. Also add host: localhost to the production configuration because the production DB will also be run on the localhost in this configuration.

When you are done the file should look similar to:

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  database: discourse_development
  username: admin
  password: <your_postgres_password>
  host: localhost
  pool: 5
  timeout: 5000
  host_names:
    - "localhost"

# Warning: The database defined as "test" will be erased and
# re-generated from your development database when you run "rake".
# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.
test:
  adapter: postgresql
  database: discourse_test
  username: admin
  password: <your_postgres_password>
  host: localhost
  pool: 5
  timeout: 5000
  host_names:
    - test.localhost

# using the test db, so jenkins can run this config
# we need it to be in production so it minifies assets
production:
  adapter: postgresql
  database: discourse_development
  username: admin
  password: <your_postgres_password>
  host: localhost
  pool: 5
  timeout: 5000
  host_names:
    - production.localhost

I'm not a fan of entering the DB password as clear text in the database.yml file. If you have a better solution to this, let me know.

Deploy the db and start the server

Now you should be ready to deploy the database and start the server.

This will start the development enviroment on port 3000.

admin@host:~$ cd ~/discourse
# Set Rails configuration
admin@host:~$ export RAILS_ENV=development
admin@host:~$ rake db:create
admin@host:~$ rake db:migrate
admin@host:~$ rake db:seed_fu
admin@host:~$ thin start

Installing the production environment

WARNING: very preliminary recipe follows

Setup the www-data account

admin@host:~$ sudo mkdir /var/www
admin@host:~$ sudo chgrp www-data /var/www
admin@host:~$ sudo chmod g+w /var/www

Configure nginx

admin@host:~$ vi ~/discourse/config/nginx.sample.conf

The nginx sample configuration file has settings for Puma. They must be updated to work with the Thin web server.

Change the following lines:

upstream discourse {
  server unix:///var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/puma0.sock;
  server unix:///var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/puma1.sock;
  server unix:///var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/puma2.sock;
  server unix:///var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/puma3.sock;
}

to:

upstream discourse {
  server unix:///var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/thin.0.sock;
  server unix:///var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/thin.1.sock;
  server unix:///var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/thin.2.sock;
  server unix:///var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/thin.3.sock;
}

admin@host:~$ cd ~/discourse/
admin@host:~$ sudo cp config/nginx.sample.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/discourse.conf
admin@host:~$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/discourse.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/discourse.conf
admin@host:~$ sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
admin@host:~$ sudo service nginx start

Deploy Discourse app to /var/www

admin@host:~$ vi config/initializers/secret_token.rb
admin@host:~$ export RAILS_ENV=production
admin@host:~$ rake assets:precompile
admin@host:~$ sudo -u www-data cp -r discourse/ /var/www
admin@host:~$ sudo -u www-data mkdir /var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets

Start Thin as a daemon listening on domain sockets

admin@host:~$ cd /var/www/discourse
admin@host:~$ sudo -u www-data thin start -e production -s4 --socket /var/www/discourse/tmp/sockets/thin.sock

Sendmail configuration

Edit /etc/hostname

sudo -u www-data sidekiq -e production -d -l /var/www/discourse/log/sidekiq.log