Discourse maintenance best practices

Hi,

I’m curious about how you are handling Discourse maintenance since we are doing tests to migrate Mozilla Hispano forums (phpbb) to our own Discourse instance.

We already installed it using docker and set up backups, but I’ll be happy to know more from your side to apply same recommendations at infrastructure level.

Thanks!

If you’re running Discourse from one container (the recommended way), there isn’t much to maintain, and updates are one click from the admin panel. Backups are a must for that though, as the database is stored in the same container.

Also, I’m assuming you’ve already done so, but I would recommend Mandrill/Sendgrid for sending emails.

discourse.m-c.org’s database is in RDS?

Yeah, we use RDS on Community IT hosted discourse instances, but I’m assuming they’re hosting it all on one server.

Yes, we’ve just set up domain to handle mandrill and we are about to test smtp settings.

One thing that bothers me is that each time you rebuild the app all modifications to import scripts are reset, we still need to learn more about docker containers I guess :wink:

Oh, I forgot, @yousef how did you configure email to handle reply by email and new topic by email?

We use a Google apps email address to receive reply email (Make sure it’s POP3 enabled). In the Discourse Admin panel (Settings > Email) enable “Reply by email enabled” and add the email address you want to use, plus the reply key wildcard (eg discourse+%{reply_key}@mozilla-community.org). After that, go through and fill out the pop3 settings below.

For new topics by email, enable the “email in” setting. On your reply email address account, create an alias for the category, then in the Discourse category settings add that alias as a custom incoming email address.

Which scripts are you modifying?

/var/www/discourse/script/import_scripts/phpbb3.rb

We are importing phpbb data daily to test everything looks good.

So I guess this alias whatever@mail.com points to discourse+%{reply_key}@mozilla-community.org or just discourse@mozilla-community.org right?

yep, for instace communityit@mozilla-community.org is an alias of discourse@mozilla-community.org

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