UPDATE: You should definitely be using the official Docker installation method provided by the Discourse team.
With the recent release of Discourse, an excellent piece of forum software by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward and Sam Saffron, I was eager to get an installation up and running myself. With a simple layout it seemed like just what I needed as support and discussion forums for a side project. Discourse is still considered to be squarely in the beta phase, so I had a hard time finding any guides or tutorials that fit my needs for deploying Discourse to a VPS. I did find a nice tutorial by Christopher Baus, but I wanted to get a setup using Capistrano rather than init.d because that feels much more Railsy to me. Read on for how I got a Digital Ocean droplet running Discourse on thin with zero-downtime deployments.
Set up your VPS
If you’re a Chef wiz and already have some recipes to provision servers for running Rails apps, you can skip ahead to the section on setting up Discourse. Chef is still on my learning TODO list, so I provisioned a server from scratch.
I started with a Digital Ocean droplet running the latest release of Ubuntu 13.04, but presumably any VPS running a recent release (12 04 or 12.10) of Ubuntu should do. Make sure your server has at least 1GB of RAM; you’ll need it to compile all of Discourse’s assets. I chose the 1GB / 1CPU plan, and it’s served me well thus far.
Secure your server
Linode already has an excellent guide on hiding your server from prying eyes, so I suggest following it to the T. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here, so this is what I followed exactly. I set my username to goodbrews for deploying anything related to that site.
Change your server’s hostname
Depending on what characters you included in your droplet’s name, DigitalOcean may not set the hostname correctly. To change my server’s hostname, I did the following:
Because I deployed my installation to forums.goodbre.ws, I changed the first line of my /etc/hosts/ file to:
Create a swapfile
If you’re running on a VPS service that automatically provisions a swap (such as Linode), you can skip this. On Digital Ocean, however, you’ll need to do this yourself. 1GB of RAM was enough for my first deployment but, when I tried to run a second, I wasn’t able to allocate enough memory to compile assets. Creating a swap, however, has fixed this issue for me. Let’s create a 512MB swapfile:
Then, you’ll need to edit /etc/fstab and paste in the following line:
Finally, prevent your swapfile from being readable:
Install Ruby 2.0.0-p195 and bundler
SSH into your VPS as your deployment user and install the necessary dependencies to build Ruby on Ubuntu:
Now, I personally enjoy using rbenv and ruby-build, so this tutorial will follow installation prodecures around those tools. Feel free to use RVM, chruby, or some other Ruby version manager if you wish.
NOTE: the installation guide for rbenv mentions using ~/.profile instead of ~/.bash_profile, but I found the latter to work for me. You can try either if you have issues.
Finally, you’ll need bundler.
Install nginx
I prefer to run my Rails apps under nginx. Plus, Discourse comes with a sample configuration file that requires little tweaking. No brainer!
Install PostgreSQL, Redis, and other required libraries
Discourse requires PostgreSQL and Redis to run, so let’s install those as well:
Note that postgresql-contrib-9.1 will install the hstore extension for PostgreSQL, which Discourse requires. You’ll need to create a postgres role and Discourse’s production database:
And now your VPS should be set up and ready to run Discourse! That means it’s time to…
Set up Discourse
Because you’ll need to configure it yourself, Discourse is a prime candidate for forking. If you don’t have Ruby installed on your own computer, yet, I recommend installing rbenv locally. The same steps above will work (or follow rbenv’s installation guide), so make sure you have Ruby 2.0.0-p195 installed.
Then, clone your fork locally (on your own computer).
Edit the Discourse configuration files
Copy the sample configuration files…
… and edit them with your own information. database.yml should, of course, be edited to use the postgres role that you configured earlier (I also changed the name of the production database to discourse_production as I mentioned earlier).
redis.yml is unlikely to change if you’ve followed this guide and are running it on the same server.
production.rb is where you’ll want to configure how your Discourse installation’s email gets sent out. Personally, I use Mandrill and configured my app to hit their API.
nginx.conf is trickier depending on your needs, however. For instance, I set my discourse installation up to use HTTPS and provisioned SSL certificates from StartSSL. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll stick with basic HTTP. I prefer deploying my applications into the home directory of my deployment user to ensure proper ownership, so my nginx.conf file ended up looking like:
The max_fails=1 fail_timeout=15s statements on the end of the upstream thin servers is what will help us achieve zero-downtime deployments. As we’re phasing out old thin processes with new ones, any failures on an old thin process will cause nginx to cease handing it requests. It will, instead, hand the request to an old thin process that’s either still running or one of the new thin processes that has already started.
Configure thin
You’ll also want a thin configuration file to make your life easier:
This will generate a file, config/thin.yml, which you should then go edit. Make sure to set the chdir, log, pid, and socket keys to the correct paths. My thin configuration looks like this:
Make sure you add the onebyone: true key. This is the secret sauce that will make your Thin servers restart… You guessed it… One by one. Zero downtime!
Create a secret token
Discourse doesn’t ship with a secret token set, since it’s not recommended to be version controlled. Therefore, you’ll need to generate one and set it yourself:
Open up config/initializers/secret_token.rb and paste the generated secret
somewhere (probably line 10). You can delete the rest of the file.
Set up Capistrano
Add the following to Discourse’s Gemfile:
Create a Capfile in Discourse’s root directory:
Create your deployment recipe file at config/deploy.rb. Here’s what mine looks like:
These should be all of the necessary Capistrano recipes you need to run your first deployment. Let’s do that now!
Deploy Discourse
Okay, you’ve got your server set up and Discourse configured… Let’s do this!
Configure Discourse
Congratulations! You should now have Discourse running on your VPS. Now that your forums are up and running, you’ll want to follow the Quick Start Guide that the Discourse team has written up.
Keeping Discourse up-to-date
You’ll, of course, want to keep your copy of Discourse up-to-date with the main repository. To do so, cd into your local copy and set up an upstream remote:
And there you go. Whenever you want to update, just fetch upstream, merge it into master, push, and redeploy.
Anything here wrong?
Please let me know if the above steps didn’t work for you. It’s possible that I accidentally left a step out of my process or that the process has changed and I don’t know about it. Reply to my thread on meta.discourse.org where I’ve posted this guide, or shoot me an email using the link at the top.