SAC:Discourse

OSGeo hosts a Discourse server accessible at https://discourse.osgeo.org

The service runs in a set of Docker containers inside an LXD VM hosted on osgeo9 machine and administered by the OSGeo System Administration Committee.

Gory details are in private https://gitea.osgeo.org/sac/discourse/wiki/discourse

Usage

Sign up

It current allows OSGeo LDAP, OSGeo Gitea, GitHub, and local sign up methods

Deploy

The deploy was done following upstream instructions here: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md#6-install-discourse

Those instruction imply an interactive session, but at the end of the process we are left with a couple of docker containers:

  - import
  - mail-receiver

Administration

All administrative tasks are done via the web interface.

Some seem to require intervention on host files ( ie: receiver.yml ?).

We should put more configuration into ansible, see https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/3424

Mail gateway

Discourse sends mail using lists.osgeo.org as the SMTP server (see DISCOURSE_SMTP_ADDRESS in /var/discourse/containers/app.yml) and `discourse.osgeo.org` as the domain name.

Receives mail on its own, via an MX record for discourse.osgeo.org (but see https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/3068 for an issue about that).

The incoming mail is received via a network forward on the LXD host of port 25 for the public IP address 140.211.15.5 to the discourse VM container which in turn proxies it to the `mail-receiver' docker container. This setup has an unwanted side-effect of making the mails sent from other containers on the same LXD host as Discourse appear as coming from a private IP address, which in turn may trigger a rejection due to SPF not allowing that. See https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/3395#comment:31

Issues

Known issues about the Discourse service can be found here: https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/query?component=SysAdmin%2FDiscourse&status=!closed

Mailing list migration

Some of mailman mailing lists have been migrated to Discourse.

Details on how to ask for migration of your list are here https://discourse.osgeo.org/docs?topic=6765

Theming

We tweak the login form CSS a little in order to fix the LDAP button background, the labels, and to tweak the display order of the options.

This is done from https://discourse.osgeo.org/admin/customize/themes/1/common/scss/edit

.btn.ldap {
    background-color: #fff;
    order: 1;
}

.btn.ldap:hover {
    background-color: var( --primary-medium );
}

.btn.ldap span.btn-social-title {
    visibility: hidden;
}

.btn.ldap span.btn-social-title:before {
    visibility: visible;
    content: 'Log in with OSGeo UserID (LDAP)';
}

.btn.oidc {
    order: 2;
}

.btn.oidc span.btn-social-title {
    visibility: hidden;
}

.btn.oidc span.btn-social-title:before {
    visibility: visible;
    content: 'Log in with OSGeo Gitea';
}

.btn.passkey-login-button {
    order: 3;
}

.btn.github {
    order: 4;
}