Discourse(R) packaged by Bitnami
Bitnami by VMware | 3.2.1-0-r01 on Debian 12Linux/Unix, Debian 12 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
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)
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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.