Discourse

Prepare Your Settings

In your auth project’s settings file, do the following:

  • Add 'allianceauth.services.modules.discourse', to your INSTALLED_APPS list
  • Append the following to your local.py settings file:
# Discourse Configuration
DISCOURSE_URL = ''
DISCOURSE_API_USERNAME = ''
DISCOURSE_API_KEY = ''
DISCOURSE_SSO_SECRET = ''

Install Docker

wget -qO- https://get.docker.io/ | sh

Install Discourse

Download Discourse

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

Configure

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

Change the following:

To install behind Apache/Nginx, look for this section:

...
## which TCP/IP ports should this container expose?
expose:
  - "80:80"   # fwd host port 80   to container port 80 (http)
...

Change it to this:

...
## which TCP/IP ports should this container expose?
expose:
  - "7890:80"   # fwd host port 7890   to container port 80 (http)
...

Or any other port will do, if taken. Remember this number.

Build and launch

nano /etc/default/docker

Uncomment this line:

DOCKER_OPTS="--dns 8.8.8.8 --dns 8.8.4.4"

Restart Docker:

service docker restart

Now build:

./launcher bootstrap app
./launcher start app

Web Server Configuration

You will need to configure your web server to proxy requests to Discourse.

A minimal Apache config might look like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName discourse.example.com
    ProxyPass / http://0.0.0.0:7890/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://0.0.0.0:7890/
</VirtualHost>

A minimal Nginx config might look like:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name discourse.example.com;
    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:7890;
    }
}

Configure API

Generate admin account

From the /var/discourse directory,

./launcher enter app
rake admin:create

Follow prompts, being sure to answer y when asked to allow admin privileges.

Create API key

Navigate to discourse.example.com and log on. Top right press the 3 lines and select Admin. Go to API tab and press Generate Master API Key.

Add the following values to your auth project’s settings file:

  • DISCOURSE_URL: https://discourse.example.com (do not add a trailing slash!)
  • DISCOURSE_API_USERNAME: the username of the admin account you generated the API key with
  • DISCOURSE_API_KEY: the key you just generated

Configure SSO

Navigate to discourse.example.com and log in. Back to the admin site, scroll down to find SSO settings and set the following:

  • enable_sso: True
  • sso_url: http://example.com/discourse/sso
  • sso_secret: some secure key

Save, now set DISCOURSE_SSO_SECRET in your auth project’s settings file to the secure key you just put in Discourse.

Finally run migrations and restart Gunicorn and Celery.