Deploy the Discourse charm for the first time

What you’ll do

• Deploy the Discourse charm
• Integrate with nginx-ingress-integrator, postgresql-k8s and redis-k8s charms
• Inspect the Kubernetes resources created

In this tutorial, we’ll go through each step of the process to get a basic Discourse deployment.

Requirements

• A working station, e.g., a laptop, with amd64 architecture.
• Juju 3 installed and bootstrapped to a MicroK8s controller. You can accomplish this process by using a Multipass VM as outlined in this guide: Set up / Tear down your test environment
• NGINX Ingress Controller. If you’re using MicroK8s, this can be done by running the command microk8s enable ingress. For more details, see Addon: Ingress.

For more information about how to install Juju, see Get started with Juju.

When using a Multipass VM, make sure to replace 127.0.0.1 IP addresses with the VM IP in steps that assume you’re running locally. To get the IP address of the Multipass instance run multipass info my-juju-vm.

Steps

Shell into the Multipass VM

NOTE: If you’re working locally, you don’t need to do this step.

To be able to work inside the Multipass VM first you need to log in with the following command:

multipass shell my-juju-vm

Add a Juju model for the tutorial

To easily clean up the resources and separate your workload from the contents of this tutorial, set up a new Juju model named discourse-tutorial:

juju add-model discourse-tutorial

Deploy the charms

Discourse requires connections to PostgreSQL and Redis. For more information, see the Charm Architecture.

NOTE: Discourse requires PostgreSQL extensions to be available in the relation.

Deploy the charms:

juju deploy redis-k8s --channel latest/edge
juju deploy postgresql-k8s --channel 14/stable --trust
juju deploy discourse-k8s

Enable the required PostgreSQL extensions:

juju config postgresql-k8s plugin_hstore_enable=True plugin_pg_trgm_enable=True

Integrate with the Redis k8s charm the PostgreSQL k8s charm

Integrate redis-k8s and postgresql-k8s to discourse-k8s:

juju integrate redis-k8s discourse-k8s
juju integrate discourse-k8s postgresql-k8s

By running juju status --relations the current state of the deployment can be queried:

Model               Controller  Cloud/Region        Version  SLA          Timestamp
discourse-tutorial  microk8s    microk8s/localhost  3.5.4    unsupported  14:07:18+03:00

App             Version  Status  Scale  Charm           Channel        Rev  Address         Exposed  Message
discourse-k8s   3.3.0    active      1  discourse-k8s   latest/stable  173  10.152.183.231  no
postgresql-k8s  14.12    active      1  postgresql-k8s  14/stable      381  10.152.183.143  no
redis-k8s       7.2.5    active      1  redis-k8s       latest/edge     36  10.152.183.188  no

Unit               Workload  Agent  Address      Ports  Message
discourse-k8s/0*   active    idle   10.1.32.182
postgresql-k8s/0*  active    idle   10.1.32.184         Primary
redis-k8s/0*       active    idle   10.1.32.181

Integration provider           Requirer                       Interface          Type     Message
discourse-k8s:restart          discourse-k8s:restart          rolling_op         peer
postgresql-k8s:database        discourse-k8s:database         postgresql_client  regular
postgresql-k8s:database-peers  postgresql-k8s:database-peers  postgresql_peers   peer
postgresql-k8s:restart         postgresql-k8s:restart         rolling_op         peer
postgresql-k8s:upgrade         postgresql-k8s:upgrade         upgrade            peer
redis-k8s:redis                discourse-k8s:redis            redis              regular
redis-k8s:redis-peers          redis-k8s:redis-peers          redis-peers        peer

The deployment finishes when all the charms show Active states.

Run kubectl get pods -n discourse-tutorial to see the pods that are being created by the charms:

NAME                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
modeloperator-c584f6f9f-qf9gr    1/1     Running   0          5m30s
redis-k8s-0                      3/3     Running   0          5m22s
discourse-k8s-0                  2/2     Running   0          5m1s
postgresql-k8s-0                 2/2     Running   0          5m9s

Provide ingress capabilities

In order to expose the charm, the Nginx Ingress Integrator needs to be deployed and integrated with Discourse:

juju deploy nginx-ingress-integrator

To check if RBAC is enabled run the following command:

microk8s status | grep rbac

If it is enabled, then the output should be like the following:

rbac                 # (core) Role-Based Access Control for authorisation

If the output is empty then RBAC is not enabled.

If your cluster has RBAC enabled, you’ll be prompted to run the following command:

juju trust nginx-ingress-integrator --scope=cluster

Then you need to integrate the charm with Nginx Ingress Integrator:

juju integrate discourse-k8s nginx-ingress-integrator

Create an admin user and log in

To create an admin user, use the create-user action:

juju run discourse-k8s/0 create-user admin=true email=email@example.com

The command will return the password of the created user. Discourse will be deployed with discourse-k8s as default hostname.

If you are following the tutorial in your local machine, modify your /etc/hosts file so that it points to 127.0.0.1:

echo 127.0.0.1 discourse-k8s >> /etc/hosts

After that, visit http://discourse-k8s to reach Discourse, using the credentials returned from the create-user action to login.

Clean up the environment

Congratulations! You have successfully finished the Discourse tutorial. You can now remove the model environment that you’ve created using the following command:

juju destroy-model discourse-tutorial --destroy-storage

If you used Multipass, to remove the Multipass instance you created for this tutorial, use the following command.

multipass delete --purge my-juju-vm

Finally, remove the 127.0.0.1 discourse-k8s line from the /etc/hosts file.