setting up a new Discourse instance for zine.cloud
I started a new project, a zine exchange club called Zine Cloud!
Here’s what I did to get started with Discourse.
- made a new email address
- bought the domain zine.cloud on spaceship.com
- set up mail forwarding
- spun up a one-click install of Discourse as a DigitalOcean droplet
- details of the droplet: 4 GB Memory / 2 Intel vCPUs / 70 GB Disk / SFO3 - Discourse on Ubuntu 22.04
- added zine.cloud to “domains” in DigitalOcean, and changed to “custom nameservers” on spaceship.com. added the ip address to the A record in DigitalOcean.
- signed up for a new brevo.com account for SMTP because it’s free up to 300 mails a day, not just a free trial.
- in digitalocean, tried using the web console a lot of times, but it kept crashing
- in digitalocean, used the “recovery console”
- discourse setup script could not find zine.cloud
- waited for dns
- signed up for a new maxmind account
- discourse setup script worked
- wait for discourse to install…
- it works! zine.cloud is up! signing up for account…
- no email. oh, i have to do dkim/domain auth in brevo and digitalocean dns.
- ok, i authenticated my domain! let’s try sending the email again
- got it! yay! setting up Discourse…