Help with setting up Discourse on a RIT website

[effendiian (Ian Effendi)]

Overview

I want to set up a Discourse community on an organization’s existing website. I am looking to hear about challenges associated with setting up Discourse for the FOSS community. Is this the best topic to put that under? Is there a topic for ‘searching for help’?

Goal

I’m looking for advice on what next steps we should take to incorporate Discourse as a part of my organization’s website. I’ll probably reply to this post if I find out answers to some of my own questions, just in case someone else finds it useful.

Questions

I’m looking to answer the following questions:

• Are there any limitations on RIT’s servers (like ritweboffshell) for hosting Discourse?
• Are there simpler options that might serve a similar purpose: providing a forum for our community members?
• Is it possible to incorporate RIT’s SSO as a part of the Discourse community website?
• What experience should my e-board look for in hiring webmasters to maintain the community? (This will help as my successors are going to be looking to hire more team members soon).

[jwf (Justin W. Flory (he/him))]

Hi Ian!

incorporate Discourse as a part of my organization’s website.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Incorporate it into an existing website? Is it replacing functionality or integrating with an existing system?

Are there any limitations on RIT’s servers (like ritweboffshell ) for hosting Discourse?

This likely depends on department-specific policy. I suggest checking with who hosts your web service on campus if they allow Docker deployments in their infrastructure.

Are there simpler options that might serve a similar purpose: providing a forum for our community members?

You can also pay Discourse to set up a managed installation instead of you setting it up and backing it up yourself.

Is it possible to incorporate RIT’s SSO as a part of the Discourse community website?

I’m sure it is possible, but I don’t think there is a pre-existing solution for this yet. It could be a cool project for a future semester.

What experience should my e-board look for in hiring webmasters to maintain the community? (This will help as my successors are going to be looking to hire more team members soon).

If you decide to host it yourself instead of choosing a hosted solution, your system administrator should be familiar with Linux command line and Docker containers. If you follow upstream Discourse’s installation instructions exactly as given, it’s fairly simple and not too complicated. It becomes complicated if you want to break out of their prescribed method of setting it up.