/discourse-charm

Deploy Discourse using Juju!

Primary LanguageShellOtherNOASSERTION

About

This charm installs the Discourse application, http://discourse.org

Install

After you've successfully bootstrapped an environment, run the following:

juju deploy cs:~marcoceppi/discourse
juju deploy postgresql

Then create relations

juju add-relation discourse postgresql:db-admin

Discourse requires db-admin level access in order to enable the hstore plugin. Finally, expose discourse:

juju expose discourse

Configure

There are several configuration options you can use to manage your Discourse deployment. With the exception of admins, all defaults should suffice for most deployments. Take care when adjusting other options as they may produce an unstable deployment if unexpected values are used.

admins

In order to access the Discourse Admin tools you must specify which users should be admins. After creating your account in Discourse, add your name and the name of others who should be admin using this configuration option. The option takes a string of comma separated usernames. You can find a username by visiting a user's profile and copying the last part of the URL, in this case "marcoceppi": http://meta.discourse.org/users/marcoceppi. To set just one admin do the following:

juju set discourse admins="marcoceppi"

Where "marcoceppi" is the username. For multiple admins use commas to separate values:

juju set discourse admins="marcoceppi,codinghorror,sam,eviltrout"

If a user does not exist they will not be granted admin access and will simply be skipped.

This will not be updated when a user is granted access via the admin panel. Also, in the event you need to remove an admin you'll not only have to update this configuration option but you'll also need to Revoke admin in the admin panel. This option is designed to set up "god" users, to recover a board if administrative access is lost, and during initial setup to define who gets access to the site after installation. Further moderator and admin assignments should happen in the admin panel.

repository

If you maintain a forked version of the Discourse repository, you can deploy or swap to that modified repository at any time. It's recommended you use upstreams git repo at https://github.com/discourse/discourse.git or at least monitor it for security and feature updates.

juju set discourse repository="https://code.example.tld/repo/discourse.git"

In order to make use of the version option, you will need to push to your Discourse repo with the --tags option. Otherwise git tags will not be moved over which the version option relies on.

release

Release is an easy way to "pin" your install at a known and familiar version of Discourse, allowing you to "upgrade" to another version when you're ready. By default this Discourse charm deploys against the "latest-release" Git tag which is pointed at the latest version of Discourse.

For production deployments of Discourse it's recommended you change this version either during deployment or shortly after to the corrosponding release of Discourse you deployed. Doing so will ensure that during scale-out you'll maintain the same version of Discourse between units. Failure to do so may result in broken behavior due to version inconsistency between units.

juju set discourse version="v0.9.1"

Release can be any valid git ref (git tag, git branch) in the given repository

thins

This option allows you to control how many instances of thin you wish to run on one unit. By default (auto) will select a number of 2 or greater depending on machine resources (CPU and RAM) available. If you wish to override this behavior you can manipulate this option as long as it's a positive integer. All other values will result in "auto" being used.

juju set discourse thins=2

Upstream recommends at least 2 instances of thin running in order to properly handle requests to the application.

env

If you wish to modify the environment variables sent to the Application you can override them here. This option is designed to allow performance tweaking to be done against a Discourse install. By default this charm will apply the recommended performance tuning for the verion of Ruby installed. To remove these simply set this configuration option to a blank string ("")

juju set discourse env="RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=90000000"

You can specify multiple variables using a space between KEY=VAL pairings

Extras

These are additional things you can do to enhance your base install.

Shared queuing server

If you have a need for a scaled out queuing server, or if you find yourself with many discourse units, it will be beneficial to use a separate redis server for queue management. To conserve resources all units, by default, have their own redis-server installed. However, you can deploy and add a relation to the redis-master charm in order to provide a central redis server.

juju deploy redis-master redis
juju add-relation discourse redis:db

In doing so the local redis-server installs will be removed and the site re-configured to use the new redis service. For more information on scaling out redis, refer to the redis-slave charm.

Additional Help

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