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 laptop or desktop running Ubuntu (or you can use a VM).
• Juju and Microk8s installed. We’ll also want to make sure the ingress add-on is enabled, which we can do by running microk8s enable ingress.

Steps

Set up environment

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

juju add-model discourse

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
juju config postgresql-k8s plugin_pg_trgm_enable=True

Integrate the charms

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  microk8s    microk8s/localhost  3.1.7    unsupported  12:48:02+02:00

App             Version  Status  Scale  Charm           Channel      Rev  Address         Exposed  Message
discourse-k8s   3.2.0    active      1  discourse-k8s   stable        95  10.152.183.175  no       
postgresql-k8s  14.10    active      1  postgresql-k8s  14/stable    193  10.152.183.59   no       
redis-k8s       7.0.4    active      1  redis-k8s       latest/edge   27  10.152.183.46   no       

Unit               Workload  Agent  Address      Ports  Message
discourse-k8s/0*   active    idle   10.1.44.214         
postgresql-k8s/0*  active    idle   10.1.44.219         
redis-k8s/0*       active    idle   10.1.44.227         

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 to see the pods that are being created by the charms:

NAME                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
modeloperator-64c58d675d-csj47   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
# If your cluster has RBAC enabled you'll be prompted to run the following:
juju trust nginx-ingress-integrator --scope=cluster

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. In order to reach it, 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 --destroy-storage