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.