Step-by-Step Tutorial for Installing Outline on Digital Ocean with Ubuntu 22.04

[thomasgriffin]

Hey everyone,

I see lots of people have experienced many of the same issues that I myself experienced trying to setup Outline in a production environment. After spending countless hours off and on over the last 6 months, I've finally completed a step-by-step tutorial for installing Outline on Digital Ocean with Ubuntu 22.04.

I've gone through the tutorial 4 times now to validate the results, and I can confirm they are repeatable. I've done my best to include helpful screenshots and commentary, and I've also implemented some best practices to secure the installation as well.

Much of the stuff I have in the tutorial is either not listed in the official docs at all or simply assumed in the docs. For example, in the sample .env file, the URL connections for Postgres and Redis simply do not work when trying to put this in production. Or did you know that if you don't put the POSTGRES_DB variable before the POSTGRES_USER and POSTGRES_PASS variables, it won't create the database and roles correctly in Docker? Additionally, some things are more complex than they need to be, and where I have experienced that, I've done my best to simplify the process.

Outline is awesome. I love it. My hope is that this tutorial helps others install it successfully so that they can experience using it with their teams too. 💯

You can find the tutorial here: https://thomasgriffin.com/how-to-install-the-outline-knowledge-base-wiki-on-ubuntu/

Feel free to drop comments there or here, including any feedback about the tutorial or snags you run into along the way.

[ReessKennedy]

Amazing tutorial here @thomasgriffin ! I had an existing server running Docker, Redis and Postgres with other stuff installed on the same server but used your tutorial to understand how to hook them together and it was especially useful re: the AWS S3 settings which don't seem very detailed in the default install instructions. Well done here, Thomas. Thank you.

[thomasgriffin]

The feedback on the tutorial has been amazing! I've seen and heard about so many people getting Outline setup properly for the first time by following it.

I wanted to drop back here and mention a couple of updates I have made to the tutorial, specifically:

• Fixing the monthly cron so that it works properly. It needed an executable command, and I fixed a couple of docker commands to ensure that it pulled down the latest image of Outline.
• Fixing an issue with AWS bucket authentication, changing the ACLs to enabled and toggling the Bucket owner preferred setting on.
• Fixing an issue with 403 access denied requests for assets uploaded to S3. The blanket "Block public access" setting being toggled on was no good, so turning it off fixed those issues.

Anyways, hope it continues to be helpful!

[thomasgriffin]

I've made a couple of additional updates to the tutorial, including fixing an issue where a deprecated yarn command has been updated with the new command, as well as adding support for daily cron pings that Outline needs to trigger various services.

I'll be testing the tutorial again this month to make sure that things are updated where needed to support WebSockets editing.

And, I'm delighted to share that more than 1,000 people have successfully set up Outline using the tutorial above. 😎

[aresstokrat]

Demo site is not working. Trying to login with simple email sign up h it doesn't send email with activation to me.

[thomasgriffin]

@aresstokrat I think what you are looking for is to sign up for an account on the Outline hosted platform at getoutline.com. That will give you a demo of the system itself, and then you can determine if you want to install the open source software or not.

[aresstokrat]

That's the first thing I tryed to do. Impossible. They asking for google , slack, Microsoft workspace corp accounts for sign up, I don't have corp accounts. I'm just an ordinary guy )

[tommoor]

There are a plethora of products designed for individual note taking, Outline is designed for teams hence the available sign-in methods.

[aresstokrat]

Me and my teammates don't use corp accounts. Why should we? We are independent individuals. Not corp workers. Community with a hobby. Still we are making projects together.
For individual work we use obsidian.

[Limezy]

You can open a slack workspace for free, then log in Outline, then activate the login by email through magic link for each of you. No need to use that slack account at all. As said in another post, you can alternatively install Yunohost as your community server management system, Outline is available as an "app" for one click installation, and you can then use the Yunohost local user base for authentication. I'm sure there are some other alternatives too !

[thomasgriffin]

I've just completed walking through the tutorial again to validate everything is working as expected. All is good!

Best to everyone using it to get Outline up and running on their own server. 🚀

[ericklindberg]

I don't really comment on too many things here, however, I just wanted to say thank you! Your guide was clear enough to allow anybody to manipulate it well enough to get it working. By that, I mean that I was able to get it set up with a MiniIO "S3" and Slack authorization, using HA Proxy as the proxy. Again, really appreciate it! I'll gladly share my notes if anybody needs help with this.

[thomasgriffin]

Awesome, glad to hear it was helpful for you!

[huds0nx]

I finished your tutorial, it was great, but when finally trying to access the domain, I am getting an nginx "502 Bad Gateway" error. When I check my docker logs, I see these two errors coming up frequently:
recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: {my ip}, server: {my domain}, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:3000/favicon.ico", host: {my droplet ip}

upstream prematurely closed connection while reading response header from upstream, client: {my ip}, server: {my domain}, request: "GET / HTTP/2.0", upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:3000/", host: {my droplet ip}

Any ideas? Help would mean the world :)

[thomasgriffin]

@huds0nx Can you try setting user: root in your docker-compose.yml file? I have heard a few people say that has worked for them!

[huds0nx]

Thanks for your reply, I tried that and unfortunately I am still getting the errors. Do you have an email I can best contact you at? I don’t think the contact form on your site is working.

[thomasgriffin]

@huds0nx I would also try changing the ownership of the /opt/outline directory to be owned by the nodejs user, as that has also been mentioned as a possible fix for that 502 error.

Also, thank you for letting me know about the contact form being broken! I have gotten it fixed (bad caching), so it should work now. Feel free to use that to reach out directly.

[thomasgriffin]

I've completed another round of updates to the tutorial, and I've also added support for the new local file storage feature from v0.72.0 and onward.

All the best as you cross the finish line of 2023 and step confidently into 2024!

[AshwinPras]

Thank you for this fantastic guide, @thomasgriffin! I am a beginner to all this and followed your guide to the tee.

However, I also face the 502 Gateway error after doing everything (except adding SMTP). Docker Logs show no errors. In the Nginx error logs file, I saw the same kind of errors as @huds0nx reported above.

Setting user: root in your docker-compose.yml file did not help. Restarting docker containers with docker-compose down --remove-orphans && docker-compose up -d did not help either. I would really appreciate any help you can give me here.

[thomasgriffin]

Thanks for the kind words! Did you also try changing the ownership of the /opt/outline directory to be owned by the nodejs user?

[AshwinPras]

Thank you for responding, @thomasgriffin. I’m a beginner, and this set-up is for a nonprofit that does not have an IT team to run these things.

To ensure that I don’t break anything by accident as I go about changing the ownership of the /opt/outline directory - the command would be:

Chown thomas /opt/outline

Right?

Thanks again, and my apologies for asking you about rudimentary things.

[thomasgriffin]

You can do chown -R {user} /opt/outline :)

…

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On Apr 8, 2024 at 1:41:10 PM, AshwinPras ***@***.***> wrote: Thank you for responding, @thomasgriffin <https://github.com/thomasgriffin>. I’m a beginner, and this set-up is for a nonprofit that does not have an IT team to run these things. To ensure that I don’t break anything by accident as I go about changing the ownership of the /opt/outline directory - the command would be: Chown thomas /opt/outline Right? Thanks again, and my apologies for asking you about rudimentary things. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3668 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAG6ABSTJ6GLNPTEVDYF5K3Y4LJDNAVCNFSM5Y7JFXN2U5DIOJSWCZC7NNSXTOKENFZWG5LTONUW63SDN5WW2ZLOOQ5TSMBUHE2DQNY> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>