Just discovered the above in the menu when I was looking for the version. lol. Handy, thanks!
So I’ve isntalled the podman plugin, and T H A N K Y O U <3 <3 <3
Couple of questions/issues with Discourse, curious to know if anyone can point me in the right direction:
Email is forced to admin@[domain] and I don’t see a way to change that, may be missing it
As far as I can tell, Discourse cannot successfully send email - I did set up admin@[domain] on the server and it got no mail, and spam is not enabled, so it should accept anything to the inbox, I’d think. And this was an existing domain with a cert already, so theoretically everything should be there in DNS…
Any ideas?
But also… this opens up a whole new world for me, coming from cPanel until a couple of years ago, I’ve slowly been enjoying and learning more about the freedom I have with Virtualmin, but the podman plugin will make my life so much easier. I’d tried to get docker running and couldn’t, so the fact that I already have a working Discourse (sans above issues) is amazing. <3 <3 <3
Normally the best path for the kind of bulk email a forum produces is to use a service like Amazon SES or Sendgrid or Mailgun.
But, if it’s a low volume forum you might be ok using the local SMTP server. And, if the UI doesn’t give that option already, we probably should add it (with a warning about self-hosting bulk mail).
We us Mailgun for this forum and it costs about ten bucks a month for a shockingly large volume. If I were setting up today I’d probably use SES. Cheaper.
I’d certainly consider a third-party SMTP service if it takes off, but certainly to start, my humble expectation (i.e. of how it should work - what I thought it would do when I set it up) would be that it would have local SMTP working out of the box.
As it is, with my limited understanding of how containers work, I haven’t been able to figure out where the config is and how to get to it to poke around and do things like see if I can change the initial admin email - which is another expectation I had - that I should be able to specify that like when I set up a Wordpress instance and can set the user/pass for the initial admin.
I’m not making any demands - to be clear - just expressing what I’d hoped to have.
If it should be sending via local SMTP, it appears not to be. And if that’s an option somewhere, I haven’t found it yet.
Visit the site, which prompts to create an admin account
The prompt has the email “admin@[domain of virtual server]” in a dropdown box with itself as the only selectable option. You can specify the username and password.
Obviously, you’d have to create admin@[domain], but it gets worse: Even if you do create that, Discourse claims to send an email to that email account, but nothing arrives.
Furthermore, I cannot find a place to change that email, nor to configure SMTP.
Notably: I know how to update the settings in Discourse, but you haven’t gotten into Discourse yet at this point to change those settings int he admin.
Also, there’s no reason to discuss WordPress in this thread because WordPress is not what is being discussed. Discourse is, as installed by the new/upcoming podman plugin for Virtualmin.
I don’t want to be harsh, because I appreciate everyone who chimes in, so I want to be clear what the issue is, as discussing things that are not what ths issue is won’t help.
Sorry you mentioned it, I read it wrong, thought you had a issue there too. I’ll keep out of this discussion as I have little knowledge of podman and discourse.
This is pretty much what I was hoping not to have happen, although if you wish to refrain because you don’t have ideas on the specific problem, that’s alright. But I didn’t want to shut you down at all. Thank you for trying to help, at the least! <3
When I mentioned WordPress, it was to say:
i.e. I was using it as an example of something that worked, as opposed to being unable to specify settings before or after setting up the container.
Discourse has some things in the UI and some things in the config files. I don’t actually know where the stuff goes in a Virtualmin Podman deployment, so I can’t be specific. It could be we’re not even using the usual Docker orchestration scripts (which are kind of weird and, I guess, predate things like compose). @Ilia probably needs to be the one steering the conversation.
I posted this in the main thread about the plugin, but it seems topical here, too:
With Gemini assistance, I have developed a solution that appears to be working on my server, which is Ubuntu:
I posted it there so as not to spam up here, but I can post it here if desired. Basically a script that interactively allows you to create an authenticted admin user, fix gateway/host issues so when you paste links you get previews. More info over there.
If this is not desired, please remove and/or let me know to. I hope it’s helpful.
Obviously run at your own risk, but I have tested, and the script has a dry run mode.
Our module uses its own Discourse recipe instead of discourse_docker and app.yml.
It handles the same essential setup. Discourse, PostgreSQL, Redis, storage, networking, and the initial administrator.
It works well for this standard deployment, though it doesn’t expose every advanced customization supported by Discourse’s launcher. And, we shouldn’t be doing it for one-click installation for such an already complicated deployment.
You are very welcome! Thank you for your kind and positive comments! It means a world to me!
You are right! This was a bug in the Discourse recipe. We weren’t correctly creating the initial administrator or configuring Discourse to use the local mail server.
This is now fixed. The installer asks for the administrator username, email, and password, creates an already activated admin account, and configures Discourse to send mail through the Virtualmin server.
To be clear, Discourse now just passes outgoing messages to the host’s mail server, which then delivers them normally. It does not create a mailbox or modify the host’s mail-server configuration.
All that said, please install the latest updates and give it a try again! I’d also really appreciate it if, in case things work for you, you’d link back to this comment in those Discourse Forums posts you created earlier.
Absolutely will test and update threads and update the plugin. And I’m working my way through a number of the container apps to try them out, play with them, get famliar enough with them so I can feel comfortable offering hosting support for them. I see some of this as becoming a niche for local small businesses and nonprofits and such with some of these tools. Just to say I’m on board testing them out and seeing what works and doesn’t (out of the box).
