The HSBNE Forum is a Discourse instance running on a Nginx, Ubuntu 12.04 Linux stack deployed to a DigitalOcean Droplet via Ansible.

Hosts is a vhost for


Implementation Notes

The deployment handles installing the environment for Discourse, as well as implementing some basic level customisations such as logos, images, icons, and basic configuration database values. Ie, it fills enough settings that when you spin up an instance, it will no prompt you for further configuration.

This deployment is developed and tested via Vagrant. You can spin up your own copy of this server ( keeping in mind the Server Deployment repository also deploys a wiki instance etc ) by cloning and running vagrant up.

Vagrant has a VirtualBox dependency, and we also make use of a few plugins. Have a look at bin/install-deps to find them, or execute that script if you trust me :)

NB: vagrant up seems to be a touch… touchy at the moment. running it a few times and hitting vagrant provision seems to clear the bugbears. Not sure whats up.

By default, it creates an admin under my email. Edit roles/discourse/templates/initialize.rb.j2 to utilise your own.

Further forum customisation is Database specific, and the database is persistent between idempotent Ansible deployments.


  1. Fork and Clone the Repo
  2. Make your changes
  3. Test changes utilising vagrant
  4. Once happy, commit and push
  5. Create a pull request detailing the change

Deployment to the production server is limited to those whom hold the correct ssh keys and credentials folder in the Repository. Thats currently just me (Joshua Hogendorn) but may expand.