How to Deploy Discourse with Juju

by Pavel PachkovskijSeptember 2, 2013

This guide walks through the process of deployment Discourse with Juju and Rack charm.

Discourse is an open-source, next-generation discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Juju is a service orchestration management tool developed by Canonical. This guide requires a configured and successfully bootstrapped Juju environment. Please walk through getting started with Juju guide if you are not familiar with the tool yet.

Table of Contents

Configure Discourse

Firstly, you have to fork Discourse and prepare it for deployment with Juju. For this purpose, add config/redis.yml like shown below.

<%= ENV['RAILS_ENV'] %>:
  uri: <%= uri = URI.parse(ENV['REDIS_URL']) %>
  host: <%= uri.host %>
  port: <%= uri.port %>
  password: <%= uri.password %>

Copy config/environments/production.rb.sample to config/environments/production.rb.

cp config/environments/production.rb.sample config/environments/production.rb

Add new files to Git.

git add --force config/environments/production.rb config/redis.yml

Update your repository.

git add .
git commit -m 'prepare to deploy with juju'
git push origin master

Now, Discourse is ready for the deployment with JuJu.

Configure Juju

Create Rack charm config using discourse.yml as shown below.

discourse:
  repo: <repo_url>
  env: SECRET_TOKEN=ssEnesNG3f3jAhgJgSlWDLUi0U3cUrUhrTBwwancUKL91hX7ClKAgKl0Ofpv

Important: Discourse requires SECRET_TOKEN to be defined for sessions storage.

The Juju graphical user interface (Image credit)

More configuration and deployment options are available on the Rack charm page.

Deployment

Deploy Discourse with Rack charm.

juju deploy rack --config discourse.yml discourse

Deploy and relate Redis.

juju deploy redis-master
juju add-relation redis-master:redis-master discourse

Deploy and relate PostgreSQL.

juju deploy postgresql
juju add-relation postgresql:db-admin discourse

Generally, you should use the db relation for PostgreSQL, but Discourse creates the hstore extension in migrations, that’s why you have to use db-admin instead.

Finally, expose Discourse.

juju expose discourse

Use juju status or juju debug-log to watch for deployment progress.

When Discourse is deployed, create, migrate, and seed the database.

juju ssh discourse/0 run rake db:create
juju ssh discourse/0 run rake db:migrate
juju ssh discourse/0 run rake db:seed_fu

Compile assets.

juju ssh discourse/0 run rake assets:precompile

Restart Discourse.

juju ssh discourse/0 sudo restart rack

Navigate to Discourse and create your account. When you are done, promote your account to admin in the Rails console.

juju ssh discourse/0 run rails c

me = User.find_by_username_or_email('myemailaddress@me.com')
me.activate
me.admin = true
me.save

Now, you can configure Discourse from the /admin console. To learn more details about getting started with Discourse, check out this guide.

About the author

Pavel Pachkovskij has experience in front- and back-end development of web applications. He is proficient in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, CSS, etc. Pavel also worked with relational databases, such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, as well as NoSQL solutions, such as MongoDB and Redis. Find him on GitHub.