Discourse with Caddy

Caddy is a super easy to use web server that manages all the boring stuff for you, and because my Oracle always-free server’s port HTTP/HTTPS ports (80 and 443) were already in use by Caddy to hook up some webpages for my Minecraft servers, I needed a better way.

Steps

I will be assuming you already have Caddy setup, alongside that your server/network has some sort of firewall system in place to only allow desired ports. You should also have set up your DNS A record on your domain to redirect to your server’s IP address.

Add the following to your Caddyfile (/etc/caddy/Caddyfile), being sure to replace the domain with yours:

discourse.example.com {
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8080
}

Follow the beginner Discourse install guide and run the installer command, completing the configuration as normal. This will fail to complete, as we need to fix the configuration.

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/discourse/discourse_docker/main/install-discourse | sudo bash

This gets the basic installation of Discourse onto your server, which then lets us edit the configuration to work.

Edit the Discourse docker configuration (/etc/discourse/containers/app.yml) to have the following edits:

expose:
  - 8080:80
#  - 443:443
env:
  DISCOURSE_FORCE_HTTPS: true

This removes HTTPS from Discourse (Caddy will be managing that with Let’s Encrypt) and remaps the HTTP port to 8080 (so that Caddy can reverse-proxy it to port 80 externally).

Finish your Discourse install by running the following command:

sudo ./launcher rebuild app

You should now be able to follow through the rest of the Discourse install process as normal to use your forum.

Email me (link on main page) if there’s any problems with/fixes needed for this guide.

Steps#

Steps