Discourse for docker compose and rancher compose

https://github.com/leopku/discourse-compose

WHY this project born?

A set of tools for docker were shipped with offical Discourse docker release. It do many things for user to check if Discourse can run correctly in docker and run correctly.

The main shortcoming of offical release is rebuilding, rebuilding, rebuilding. Anything changed must rebuild Discourse image. Rebuilding would take a so long time and our forum can't serve our users while rebuilding. It is not acceptable for our site.

The second thing made me to write a compose version for building a Discourse site is now we were using Rancher - a Platform for Operating Docker in Production - to manager all my services. After many times failured trying to run official release under rancher, I gave it up.

The last one is I need some mirrors for faster accessing and faster rebuilding. I should make these mirrors configurable.

After digging deep into what had offical release done while booting Discourse, I found another road to the same goal.

Contributing

• Send a Pull Request with your awesome new features and bug fixes.
• Be a part of the community and help resolve issues
• Support the development of this project with a donation through wechat

FAQ

How to make build and run faster?

• Clone Discourse source code to local and update it frequently.
• If you are in China, you can clone the source code from one of some mirrors like https://git.coding.net/leopku/discourse.git.
• If your chose cloning inside container, you can set DISCOURSE_GIT_REPO env.
• Use a faster gem source by setting GEM_SOURCE env. https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/rubygems/ is a choice for chinese user.

How to configure environment variables?

1. Copy env.example to .env
2. Modify or add any environment variables as you want

What is mail container?

For many guys who first launch this awesome forum, smtp and mail problems may prevent their steps.

So I add a mail container base on mailhog - which is a fake mail server and provides a webui to show recieved emails.

This means you can easily do a preview setup with no actual smtp && email account with my default compose file.

BUT when in production, you MUST change DISCOURSE_SMTP_ADDRESS setting. You can also comment the mail container in production.

How to add a plugin without rebuilding?

1. cd volumes/discourse/plugins and put source code of the plugin you desired in this folder

2. cd volumes/discourse/tmp/run and delete these two file .db_migrated and .assets_precompiled

3. run docker-compose restart app.

   For advanced user, run docker-compose exec app /bin/bash, then manualy do db migrate and assets precompiling.

   cd /var/www/discourse
   HOME=/home/discourse USER=discourse exec chpst -u discourse:www-data -U discourse:www-data bundle exec rake db:migrate
   HOME=/home/discourse USER=discourse exec chpst -u discourse:www-data -U discourse:www-data bundle exec rake assets:precompile
   sv restart unicorn
   

How to change nginx config without rebuilding?

1. Change config file in volumes/nginx/nginx.conf and volumes/nginx/conf.d/discourse.conf
2. docker-compose exec app /bin/bash
3. sv restart nginx

Quick start

1. Prerequisites

   docker and docker-compose must installed.

2. Get source code of this project

   git clone https://github.com/leopku/discourse-compose.git
   cd discourse-compose
   

3. Get source code of discourse. Choose ONE way followed,

   • clone source code into Docker host (Recommended)

   git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse.git app/source/discourse 
   git remote set-branches --add origin tests-passed
   

   • clone source code into docker images by commenting Line18 and uncomment Line19 of app/Dockerfile. The result may look like this,

   15 ########
   16 # Uncomment next line for speed up
   17 ########
   18 # ADD ${DISCOURSE_SOURCE_PATH} /var/www/discourse
   19 git clone --single-branch --depth=1 --branch v${DISCOURSE_VERSION} ${DISCOURSE_GIT_REPO}
   

   We recommend first way. You could update only changed files but not hole code every time and only do rebuilding after updating is ready. It can fast your rebuilding and make your site back to online quickly.

4. Prepare plugins

   3.1 prepare default plugins

   cp -r app/source/discourse/plugins/* volumes/discourse/plugins/
   

   3.2 prepare any plugin you wanted

   cd volumes/discourse/plugin
   git clone https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager.git
   git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-solved.git
   ...
   

5. Prepare environment and config files

   cp env.example .env
   cp volumes/nginx/nginx.conf.example volumes/nginx/nginx.conf
   cp volumes/nginx/conf.d/discourse.conf.example volumes/nginx/conf.d/discourse.conf
   

   Check every environment variables in IMPORTANT section to meet your actual environment

6. Run

   docker-compose up -d
   

7. Enjoy

   Visit http://YOUR_DOCKER_HOST_IP:10080 and have fun.

TODOs

• Customized config parameter or file for Redis container
• Enable brotli
• Version 1 format yml for rancher compose

License

MIT