Scoold Q&A Knowledge Base

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

## Scoold - Self-Hosted Q&A Knowledge Base

Scoold is the open source, self-hosted Stack Overflow style question-and-answer platform for teams and communities. This AMI delivers Scoold fully installed and configured behind nginx with its Para backend, so your private knowledge base is running within minutes of launch - no manual Java installation, Para wiring, external database provisioning, or reverse-proxy setup required.

## Why This AMI Over the Alternatives

Unlike a DIY Scoold deployment that requires hours of manual configuration across multiple components, this AMI is production-ready from first boot. Unlike SaaS Q&A platforms, your data never leaves your VPC - the entire stack runs on your own EC2 instance with a dedicated EBS volume you control. Unlike Confluence or wiki-style tools, Scoold is purpose-built for Q&A with reputation scoring, badges, and community moderation that surface the best answers automatically.

## Who This Is For

• Engineering and IT teams who want an internal Stack Overflow to capture tribal knowledge, reduce repeat questions, and onboard faster
• Open source projects and communities running a public Q&A forum with tags, reputation and moderation
• Support and customer-success organisations building a self-service knowledge base their users can search and contribute to
• DevOps and platform engineers who want a pre-hardened, production-ready Q&A stack without assembling Scoold and Para by hand

## Application Stack

• Scoold - the Spring Boot Q&A web application: questions, answers, comments, tags, reputation, badges, spaces and SSO
• Para - the pluggable backend that powers Scoold, run fully embedded (H2 for persistence, Lucene for search, an in-JVM cache) - no external database required
• nginx - reverse proxy on port 80/443 with WebSocket support for live updates
• Both Scoold and Para bind to the loopback interface; the Para backend and its datastore are never exposed externally

## Secure By Default

On first boot, a one-shot service generates three secrets unique to this instance - the Para backend root secret, Scoold's own signing secret, and a per-instance administrator password - and provisions a dedicated administrator account, all written to a root-only file (/root/scoold-credentials.txt). No shared or default credentials ship in the image, anonymous visitors cannot self-promote to administrator, and unauthenticated administrator and settings routes are refused. The image ships with an empty backend, so each instance starts clean.

## Dedicated Data Volume

The Para datastore - the embedded H2 database, the Lucene search index and cache - lives on a dedicated, independently resizable EBS volume mounted at /opt/para, separate from the operating-system disk. This means your knowledge base data can grow, be snapshotted, and be restored independently - unlike solutions that co-mingle application data on the OS disk, making backups risky and resizing disruptive.

## Single Sign-On and Your Own Domain

Scoold supports SAML, OAuth/OpenID Connect and LDAP single sign-on. Sign in as the administrator, open the Administration area, and configure your identity provider. To serve your own domain over HTTPS, point it at the instance, install a TLS certificate on nginx, and set scoold.host_url.

## Quick Start

1. Launch the AMI on your chosen EC2 instance (m5.large or larger recommended)

2. SSH in and retrieve your admin login: sudo cat /root/scoold-credentials.txt

3. Browse to http:/// and sign in with the email and password shown

4. Open the Administration area to configure SSO, spaces, and branding

5. Ask your first question and invite your team

## AWS Integration

• Put an Application Load Balancer with an ACM certificate in front for managed TLS
• Snapshot the dedicated Amazon EBS data volume for point-in-time backups
• Monitor instance health with Amazon CloudWatch

## 24/7 cloudimg Support

This AMI includes technical support from cloudimg engineers available around the clock by email and live chat. Support covers deployment assistance, single sign-on (SAML/OAuth/LDAP) configuration, TLS termination and custom-domain setup, version upgrades, backup guidance for the Para datastore, and performance tuning. Critical issues receive a one-hour average response time.

## Get Started

Launch the AMI, retrieve your credentials, and have your private Q&A knowledge base running in minutes. For a guided deployment walkthrough or help planning your SSO integration, contact cloudimg support at any time - our engineers are available 24/7 via email and live chat.

Scoold and Para are trademarks of Erudika. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.