Discourse Community Forum

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Overview

Discourse is the open-source community discussion and forum platform used by communities, support forums, and internal teams worldwide. It is a modern Ruby on Rails and Ember application with real-time updates, threaded discussion, categories and tags, trust levels, moderation tools, single sign-on, and a full REST API. This AMI delivers Discourse installed the only officially supported way - the discourse_docker single-container stack bundling Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis and nginx - already built, secured and running, so a working forum is operational within minutes of launch.

## Why Choose This AMI Over Alternatives

vs. Manual Docker Install: Standing up Discourse yourself means cloning discourse_docker, authoring app.yml, running a 10-20 minute container rebuild that compiles assets and runs migrations, then wiring an admin account and a TLS front end. This image ships the container pre-built and bootstrapped; first boot only rotates secrets and seeds a fresh admin, so you are running in about a minute rather than half an hour.

vs. Hosted Forum SaaS: Unlike hosted forum services, this AMI gives you full data sovereignty. Your members, posts and uploads stay entirely inside your own AWS account, on a dedicated data volume you control - with no per-seat SaaS fees beyond your infrastructure and cloudimg support.

vs. Generic Container Orchestration: No ECS or EKS cluster to configure. A single EC2 instance runs the whole stack with a dedicated data volume and a host TLS terminator - production-ready without Kubernetes complexity.

## Security Hardening

This image follows a defence-in-depth approach:

• No default or shared credentials: the administrator password and personal API key are generated uniquely on every instance's first boot; nothing usable ships inside the image
• Per-instance TLS: a self-signed certificate is minted per instance at first boot and served on port 443 by a host nginx terminator; no TLS private key is baked into the image
• Network isolation: PostgreSQL and Redis run only on the container's internal network and are never published to a host port; only ports 22, 80 and 443 are exposed
• Dedicated data volume: the PostgreSQL cluster, uploads and Redis data live on their own EBS disk, surviving OS-disk changes and resizable independently as your community grows
• Clean database: all build and test content is wiped before capture; every instance starts from the bootstrapped Discourse schema with a fresh administrator

## Concrete Use Cases

• Community and support forum: run a public or members-only discussion forum for your product, project or user community, with categories, tags, trust levels and moderation tools out of the box
• Internal discussion and knowledge base: host a private team forum for long-form discussion, decisions and documentation that stays inside your own AWS account
• Customer feedback and Q and A: collect feature requests, questions and answers with Discourse's voting, solved-topic and notification features on infrastructure you control

## AWS Integration

Deploy on any EC2 instance type; the recommended size is m5.large. Front the instance with an Application Load Balancer and an ACM certificate for production TLS and your own domain, or replace the per-instance self-signed certificate with your own. Back up the forum database and uploads using EBS snapshots or AWS Backup, and resize the dedicated data volume independently of the OS disk as your community grows.

## Getting Started

Launch the AMI, wait for first-boot initialisation to complete, then open the web UI on port 443 (or 80). Retrieve your generated admin credentials from the root-only secrets file on the instance and sign in. Before production use, set your real hostname and SMTP details in the container configuration and re-run the launcher rebuild, and point your domain's DNS at the instance or load balancer. For a guided walkthrough of hostname, SMTP and TLS setup, contact cloudimg support.

## Open Source and Source Availability

Discourse is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. This image ships the official upstream Discourse container unmodified; the complete corresponding source is available from the upstream project at github.com/discourse/discourse. cloudimg's charges are for the packaging, hardening and support services described here, not for the software licence.

## cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email and live chat. Help with deployment, hostname and SMTP configuration, TLS termination, backups, plugin guidance, and updates.