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:

• DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS should be a list of admin account email addresses separated by commas.

• DISCOUSE_HOSTNAME should be discourse.example.com or something similar.

• Everything with SMTP depends on your mail settings. There are plenty of free email services online recommended by Discourse if you haven’t set one up for auth already.

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 an 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

Now set DISCOURSE_SSO_SECRET in your auth project’s settings file to the secure key you put in Discourse.

Finally, run migrations and restart Gunicorn and Celery.

Permissions

To use this service, users will require some of the following.

Permission	Admin Site	Auth Site
discourse.access_discourse	None	Can Access the Discourse Service