Overview
Discourse is an open source discussion platform with built-in moderation and governance systems that let discussion communities protect themselves from bad actors even without official moderators.
Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.
Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.
Why use Bitnami Certified Apps?
Bitnami certified images are always up-to-date, secure, and built to work right out of the box.
Bitnami packages applications following industry standards, and continuously monitors all components and libraries for vulnerabilities and application updates. When any security threat or update is identified, Bitnami automatically repackages the applications and pushes the latest versions to the cloud marketplaces.
Highlights
- Discourse is a 100% open source discussion platform with built in moderation and governance systems. It is designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
- Let discussion communities protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and bad actors - even without official moderators.
- It is self-contained so you can duplicate or move the installation to different servers easily
Details
Typical total price
$0.038/hour
Pricing
- ...
Instance type | Product cost/hour | EC2 cost/hour | Total/hour |
|---|---|---|---|
t2.medium | $0.00 | $0.046 | $0.046 |
t2.large | $0.00 | $0.093 | $0.093 |
t2.xlarge | $0.00 | $0.186 | $0.186 |
t2.2xlarge | $0.00 | $0.371 | $0.371 |
t3.medium | $0.00 | $0.042 | $0.042 |
t3.large | $0.00 | $0.083 | $0.083 |
t3.xlarge | $0.00 | $0.166 | $0.166 |
t3.2xlarge | $0.00 | $0.333 | $0.333 |
t3a.medium Recommended | $0.00 | $0.038 | $0.038 |
t3a.large | $0.00 | $0.075 | $0.075 |
Additional AWS infrastructure costs
Type | Cost |
|---|---|
EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes | $0.10/per GB/month of provisioned storage |
Vendor refund policy
N/A
Legal
Vendor terms and conditions
Content disclaimer
Delivery details
64-bit (x86) Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
An AMI is a virtual image that provides the information required to launch an instance. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances are virtual servers on which you can run your applications and workloads, offering varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources. You can launch as many instances from as many different AMIs as you need.
Version release notes
- Maintenance release
- Updated apr to 1.7.5
- Updated rails to 7.2.1
- Updated gonit to 0.2.11
- Updated python to 3.12.5
- Updated setuptools to 70.3.0
- Updated discourse to 3.3.1
- Updated orafce to 4.11.0
Additional details
Usage instructions
Once the instance is running, enter the public DNS provided by Amazon into your browser. You will then see the Discourse(R) application. The default server administrator is 'user'. Please check our documentation at https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/faq/get-started/find-credentials/ to learn how to get your password. You may change this username and password within the application settings. You can also access your instance via SSH using the username 'bitnami' and your Amazon private key. For additional setup instructions and frequently asked questions please go to https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/apps/discourse/
Resources
Vendor resources
Support
Vendor support
Bitnami also provides technical documentation for installation and setup issues through our support center at
AWS infrastructure support
AWS Support is a one-on-one, fast-response support channel that is staffed 24x7x365 with experienced and technical support engineers. The service helps customers of all sizes and technical abilities to successfully utilize the products and features provided by Amazon Web Services.
Similar products
Customer reviews
Redundant, use the official Discourse setup instead
TLDR: don't bother, set up Discourse on Amazon Linux instead.
+ve
* Easy to set up
* Easy to enable https with Let's Encrypt (But Discourse provide a script to do this anyway so not really valuable anymore)
-ve
* Not up to date with the latest version of Discourse and the upgrade button on the admin dashboard is not present. The Bitnami recommended way of upgrading is to copy your whole database to a new server with a fresh install (whenever they update the Discourse version on their stack) which is hardly a user friendly approach. It's also very confusingly described in the documentation.
* All the official Discourse support assumes you install it with Docker on a vanilla Linux instance. The Discourse "install discourse in 30 minutes" guide makes this easy.
* app.yml (the main Discourse config file) is not present in this installation, and replaced with a Bitnami config which is not comprehensively documented. This means all the support from Discourse or their community you might get will not apply.
* Either it is just impossible to set up a CDN due to the removal of the above (or Bitnami aren't documenting how)
Discourse Support forum Up in 45 minutes
Very straightforward to setup and configure following Bitnami excellent docs.
We chose the Bitnami AMI because of their presence on Lightsail (all images seem to be their support stack).
Straightforward to configure SMTP, email defaults, and the most excellent of all ÃÂâÃÂÃÂÃÂàsupport for LetEncrypt.org
* https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/apps/discourse/configuration/configure-smtp/
* https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/apps/discourse/configuration/change-default-email/
* https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/apps/discourse/administration/generate-configure-certificate-letsencrypt/
Up and running in minutes
Great AMI, got Discourse up and running within minutes. Took me a little while to work out there was already a system user. The instructions could have been clearer around this point.
Easy to install the easy part of it
Beyond this installation, you still need to configure an email server, a dns and, if you want to keep up to date with official releases, a docker on aws so you can easily update it.
So, it's not of much use in reality. Try the official Discourse steps instead.
Discourse
Discourse is great forum software, just paying $180 a year for an AWS virtual server to run it is too much.