Getting started

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the process of deploying the Discourse charm, relating it to the nginx-ingress-integrator charm, the postgresql-k8s charm and the redis-k8s charm, and inspecting the kubernetes resources created.

Requirements

You will need:

• 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.

Deploy this charm

Discourse requires connections to PostgreSQL and Redis, so those will be deployed too and related to the Discourse charm. For more information, see the Charm Architecture. Note that Discourse requires PostgreSQL extensions to be available in the relation.

All the above charms will the deployed in a new model named discourse:

# Add the model
juju add-model discourse

# Deploy the charms
juju deploy redis-k8s --channel latest/edge
juju deploy postgresql-k8s --channel 14/stable --trust
juju deploy discourse-k8s

# Enable required PostgreSQL extensions
juju config postgresql-k8s plugin_hstore_enable=True
juju config postgresql-k8s plugin_pg_trgm_enable=True

# Relate redis-k8s and postgresql-k8s to discourse-k8s
juju relate redis-k8s discourse-k8s
juju relate discourse-k8s postgresql-k8s

By running juju status --relations the current state of the deployment can be queried, with all the charms eventually reaching Activestate:

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     

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

In order to expose the charm, the Nginx Ingress Integrator is to be deployed alongside Discourse to provide ingress capabilities

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 relate discourse-k8s nginx-ingress-integrator

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.

This charm allows you to add a admin user by executing the corresponding action. Instead of interacting with the Discourse UI just run juju run discourse-k8s/0 add-admin-user email=email@example.com password=somelongpwd and it will be registered and validated.