***Guide***Install Discourse on CloudPanel with Cloudflare-Tunnels

Guides & Tutorials Tutorials
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:warning: This installation method is not officially endorsed. Use at your own risk.

The Discourse team only recommend installation using the official install guide

:information_source: This is an unsupported install, appropriate for those who have experience with CloudPanel, are experienced system administrators, and comfortable with docker, reverse proxies, and have successfully completed a standard installation.

Why CloudPanel

Why might you want to install a Discourse Forum on a VPS or Dedicated Server running CloudPanel?

Here are my reasons:

I prefer to use a graphical interface for server and site administration. I’ve used most of the web hosting control panels at one time or another.

In comparison to the rest, CloudPanel is very slim and minimal and uncluttered. It has every feature I need, presented very simply and intuitively. And that’s it. It has nothing I don’t need.

CloudPanel includes (right out-of-the-box) built-in Nginx and a simple interface for setting up and managing Reverse Proxies which are necessary in order to run one or more instances of Discourse on the same server or with other types of websites.

The Discourse team (and the Meta forum staff here) do not provide support for alternative server environments like Cpanel or Plesk or (as in this case) CloudPanel, or others that rise up out of the command line.

So I thought I’d share my setup and my process in case there are others who might find it useful.

[If anyone tries this method, please do let me know if/how it works out for you, or if I can improve this tutorial! :heart_eyes: ]

Install Docker

In Putty (or other terminal), from the root directory, run

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu focal stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli docker-compose containerd.io

Create a Reverse Proxy Site in CloudPanel

→ We click the + Add Site button…

add-site

For my Discourse instance I am using my domain name yoursite.com, so from now on wherever you see that in the rest of these instructions, replace yoursite.com with your actual domain name (for example, yoursite.com)

→ We create a new “Reverse Proxy Site” in the CloudPanel for the domain where we want to host our Discourse forum (of course the DNS A record of the domain needs to be pointing to the same IP address as our CloudPanel.)

create-reverse-proxy-site

Prepare the Domain and Set up SSL

cloudflare-logo

For my site I’m using Cloudflare’s nameservers to point the domain. In Cloudflare I set the SSL to Full or Full (strict).

I also create a Cloudflare Page Rule. Visit this post to learn why.

cloudflare-page-rule-for-discourse-sites

I’m also using a free Cloudflare SSL Origin Certificate for my domain, which I “Import” into CloudPanel within the “SSL/TLS” site settings for that site (by simply pasting in both the Certificate and the Private Key I had downloaded for that domain name from my Cloudflare account.)

cp-ssl-import

cp-ssl-import-fields

Install Discourse

Back in Putty (or other terminal), from the root directory (c d Enter to get back to the root) → Install the Discourse Standard Install using these commands…

git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse

Enter

cd /var/discourse

Enter

chmod 700 containers

Copy the Standalone Configuration

Now we copy the file /var/discourse/standalone.yml to /var/discourse/containers/ as app.yml before editing it according to our site settings.

cp /var/discourse/samples/standalone.yml /var/discourse/containers/app.yml

Edit the app.yml File

In addition to modifying the app.yml file according to our specific site settings, we need to change 3 more things in that file before we save it…

Under the section templates: we need to add

  - "templates/web.socketed.template.yml"

Because I’m using Cloudflare, under the section templates: I also add

  - "templates/cloudflare.template.yml"

Under the section expose: we need to comment out

  #- "80:80"   # http
  #- "443:443" # https

Under the section env: we need to add

   DISCOURSE_FORCE_HTTPS: true
For reference, you can Click Here to see the contents of my working app.yml on yoursite.com where I'm using both Cloudflare and Mailgun... 
## this is the all-in-one, standalone Discourse Docker container template
##
## After making changes to this file, you MUST rebuild
## /var/discourse/launcher rebuild app
##
## BE *VERY* CAREFUL WHEN EDITING!
## YAML FILES ARE SUPER SUPER SENSITIVE TO MISTAKES IN WHITESPACE OR ALIGNMENT!
## visit http://www.yamllint.com/ to validate this file as needed

templates:
  - "templates/postgres.template.yml"
  - "templates/redis.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.ratelimited.template.yml"
  - "templates/web.socketed.template.yml"
  - "templates/cloudflare.template.yml"

params:
  db_default_text_search_config: "pg_catalog.english"

  ## Set db_shared_buffers to a max of 25% of the total memory.
  ## will be set automatically by bootstrap based on detected RAM, or you can override
  db_shared_buffers: "4096MB"

  ## can improve sorting performance, but adds memory usage per-connection
  #db_work_mem: "40MB"

  ## Which Git revision should this container use? (default: tests-passed)
  #version: tests-passed

env:
  LC_ALL: en_US.UTF-8
  LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  LANGUAGE: en_US.UTF-8
  # DISCOURSE_DEFAULT_LOCALE: en

  DISCOURSE_FORCE_HTTPS: true

  ## How many concurrent web requests are supported? Depends on memory and CPU cores.
  ## will be set automatically by bootstrap based on detected CPUs, or you can override
  UNICORN_WORKERS: 8

  ## TODO: The domain name this Discourse instance will respond to
  ## Required. Discourse will not work with a bare IP number.
  DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME: 'yoursite.com'

  ## Uncomment if you want the container to be started with the same
  ## hostname (-h option) as specified above (default "$hostname-$config")
  #DOCKER_USE_HOSTNAME: true

  ## TODO: List of comma delimited emails that will be made admin and developer
  ## on initial signup example 'user1@example.com,user2@example.com'
  DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS: 'admin@yoursite.com'

  ## TODO: The SMTP mail server used to validate new accounts and send notifications
  # SMTP ADDRESS, username, and password are required
  # WARNING the char '#' in SMTP password can cause problems!
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_ADDRESS: smtp.mailgun.org
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_PORT: 587
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_USER_NAME: postmaster@yoursite.com
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_PASSWORD:  pYdRLyQW
  #DISCOURSE_SMTP_ENABLE_START_TLS: true           # (optional, default true)
  #DISCOURSE_SMTP_DOMAIN: yoursite.com    # (required by some providers)
  DISCOURSE_NOTIFICATION_EMAIL: noreply@yoursite.com    # (address to send notifications from)

  ## The http or https CDN address for this Discourse instance (configured to pull)
  ## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/14857 for details
  #DISCOURSE_CDN_URL: https://discourse-cdn.example.com

  ## The maxmind geolocation IP address key for IP address lookup
  ## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/-/137387/23 for details
  #DISCOURSE_MAXMIND_LICENSE_KEY: 1234567890123456

## The Docker container is stateless; all data is stored in /shared
volumes:
  - volume:
      host: /var/discourse/shared/standalone
      guest: /shared
  - volume:
      host: /var/discourse/shared/standalone/log/var-log
      guest: /var/log

## Plugins go here
## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/19157 for details
hooks:
  after_code:
    - exec:
        cd: $home/plugins
        cmd:
          - git clone https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager.git

## Any custom commands to run after building
run:
  - exec: echo "Beginning of custom commands"
  ## If you want to set the 'From' email address for your first registration, uncomment and change:
  ## After getting the first signup email, re-comment the line. It only needs to run once.
  #- exec: rails r "SiteSetting.notification_email='info@unconfigured.discourse.org'"
  - exec: echo "End of custom commands"

Then we save and exit the app.yml file…

CTRL-X

y

Enter

Next we set the permissions for the app.yml file…

chmod o-rwx containers/app.yml

then…

Bootstrap the App

cd /var/discourse

./launcher bootstrap app

This will take a considerable amount of time. In the end of the bootstrap process, you’ll be asked to:

./launcher start app

Edit the Vhost File

Now we go back into our CloudPanel and paste the below code into the “Vhost Editor” for our Discourse site (overwriting what is already there). Of course replace yoursite.com with your actual domain name.

server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
  {{ssl_certificate_key}}
  {{ssl_certificate}}
  server_name yoursite.com;
  {{root}}

  {{nginx_access_log}}
  {{nginx_error_log}}

  if ($scheme != "https") {
    rewrite ^ https://$host$uri permanent;
  }

  location ~ /.well-known {
    auth_basic off;
    allow all;
  }

  {{settings}}

  add_header Cache-Control no-transform;

  location / {
                proxy_pass http://unix:/var/discourse/shared/standalone/nginx.http.sock:;
                proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
                proxy_http_version 1.1;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;

  }
}

Restart Nginx

Next we need to restart Nginx, which we can do by clicking a button in the Admin Area of the CloudPanel…

restart-nginx

Congratulations!

Now, in our browser, we can go to our site’s URL and run the Discourse Setup Wizard…

setup-discourse-in-browser

Cohabitate Peacefully

Now I can self-host and manage my Discourse site right along side my Ghost, Wordpress, Drupal and other types of sites using a clean and lean management panel, with minimal need going forward to use the terminal/command line.

To Install Additional Discourse Instances…

Run other websites on the same machine as Discourse - Documentation / Self-Hosting - Discourse Meta