Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Cover image for Comprehensive Guide on Self-Hosting Forem on Heroku and Dokku is about to come.
Akhil Naidu
Akhil Naidu

Posted on • Edited on

Comprehensive Guide on Self-Hosting Forem on Heroku and Dokku is about to come.

For the past couple of months, I have been working on different ways to self-host Forem. Now is the time to share my work with you guys.

I already wrote a series of articles on how to self-host, but most of them are related to Development Instance, and now for the first time, I'm about to write articles on Production-based Forem.

For you to have a quick peek at the Production Instances, I'm attaching the URLs to access them with few details about the instance.

  1. Heroku Based
  2. VPS(Digital Ocean) + Dokku

Going forward, if you are someone like me who wish to host the Forem instance on your own, I would like to hear your opinions in writing and shaping the upcoming guide.

Updates

  • Guide for Forem on Heroku is Ready, click here to view it.
  • Guide for Forem on Digital Ocean VPS using Dokku is about to come.

Discussions, that are worth mentioning.

Update 01, In response to @ce7in comment
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The above mentioned Heroku production instance is based upon the Heroku free tier, which has a cooldown of 30 minutes, so sometimes you may face a downside while you are trying to access it. All you have to do is wait for the first error and then reload.

Update 02, In response to @lee comment
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Most of you might find this post after the official release of the Forem guide. So take this as a side note for everyone who is about to follow this guide.

As mentioned in one of the comments, this guide will be handy for those people who want to install Forem in VPS but want to have the flexibility of Heroku. Simply speaking, you are interested in installing Forem in Heroku but can't afford its high price.

Update 03, my thoughts
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

After looking into the comments of @ioscasey and @manuel , I decided to make this guide an alternative or supportive guide to the official documentation. At the same time, I also want to make Forem accessible ASAP to non-developers. So for starters, I will provide a copy-paste guide, and after the release of official Forem documentation, I will write a manual with detailed explanations.

Top comments (7)

Collapse
 
lee profile image
Lee

I think the official one from the Forem team is also coming shortly.

Collapse
 
akhil profile image
Akhil Naidu

It is nice to knowing that.

But for some reason, Forem within Heroku is exceptionally good and at the same time costly! So I thought to work with dokku(as I consider it as a open source Heroku :p)

So, in later stages if someone want to host Forem in VPS, but like to have the architecture of Heroku, they can follow this guide. This is all after speculating that Forem in VPS will be installed through docker or through the way it is done in Gitpod.

Collapse
 
ce7in profile image
Muhammed Cetin

Do you have a rumor or an exact prediction about thata. When will the official production guide will be accessible? In 1 month, a few months or a year...

I want to hear your predictions about that because I've been trying to install it on Production mode for 2 weeks but I couldn't be successful. I've tried Heroku, Docker-compose and manual installation. Each time there were different errors. I've tried a lot of solution methods but I've failed :(

Collapse
 
ioscasey profile image
Casey πŸ’Ž

Heyo! Casey from the Forem Community team just piggybacking off of Lee's comment, we're close. I don't have an exact date/time frame but we are indeed close :)

Collapse
 
manuel profile image
Manuel

Thats great Akhil! Will helppeople that want to install Forem by their own, it tooked me 2 days to install it and think I still have a couple of little issues on my instance. With a proper guide should be just couple of hours.

Also the official guide should arrive soon, but this will allow everyone to start trying Forem now and getting familiar.

Collapse
 
ce7in profile image
Muhammed Cetin

The Heroku based instance don't work. The other one looks good. I know that I've asked a lot of questions about the Production-based Forem, and I've been trying to install it on Heroku, still. The article that you're going to publish about Production-based installation of Forem will be so beneficial for me and the other Forem waiters.

Thank you for your efforts.

Collapse
 
galabre2 profile image
Jay

This is great job and great energy :)
Any news on either of the documentation, where to find the most up to date?