Forem DigitalOcean Setup on MacOS

Introduction

In this guide you will learn how to set up your Forem self-host instance on DigitalOcean.
You will also set up DNS for your domain and restart Forem Traefik service to generate a TLS cert.

Prerequisites

• Forem Requirements guide
• Quick Start in Depth guide.
• A DigitalOcean Account

Step 1- Installing DigitalOcean Ansible Collection

In this step you will install the necessary collection for DigitalOcean.
In your terminal make sure you are in the selfhost directory with:

cd selfhost

Install the DigitalOcean Ansible collection with:

ansible-galaxy collection install community.digitalocean

Alternatively you can install all the cloud provider collections with:

ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml

This is useful if you want to try other cloud providers.

Step 2- Installing doctl

In this step you will install DigitalOcean's CLI doctl to set up preset variables.

You can install doctl with Homebrew.
In your terminal type

brew install doctl

Step 3- Generating a DigitalOcean Auth Token

In this step you will generate an Auth Token in DigitalOcean’s Control Panel.

Log in to the DigitalOcean Control Panel. If you see a Welcome page click the Explore our control panel link

Click the API link in the main navigation to go to the Applications & API page.

In the Tokens/Keys tab click the Generate New Token button.

Enter a name for your Token.

Check the Write box then click the Generate Token button.

Save your generated token.

In your terminal run

doctl auth init

and pass in the API token you generated.

If you have set it up correctly you should see the following message in your terminal:

Validating token... OK

Note: If you have an old API token set up for DigitalOcean already you can update it with the following command:

doctl auth init --access-token <your-new-key>

Verify that you can authenticate to the DigitalOCean API with the following command:

doctl account get

Step 4- Provisioning the Playbook

In this step you will provision the DigitalOcean provider playbook to set up your Forem.

In your terminal type:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/forem/setup.yml playbooks/providers/digitalocean.yml

Once you run the command, you should see an output in your terminal similar to the code below with your community's domain name and IP address.

ok: [forem] => 
  msg:
  - The public IPv4 IP Address for www.creativecommunity.club is 54.221.141.133
  - Please add an A entry for www.creativecommunity.club that points to 54.221.141.133
  - 'Example:'
  - '    www.creativecommunity.club IN A 54.221.141.133'
  - 'Once you have DNS resolving to this EC2 instance please read the Forem Admin Docs: https://forem-admin.netlify.app/'

Note: DigitalOcean does not have support for Fedora CoreOS. We have to upload a custom image to your account via Ansible. If the "Wait for fcos-{{ fcos_download_release }} to be created" task times out. please check the Custom Images section on your DigitalOcean account to see if your image is still in a pending state. Wait for it to finish processing and re-run the DigitalOcean provider playbook.

Now you can set up an A record and point it to your public IPv4 IP Address

Step 5- Setting up DNS

In this step you will see an example of creating an A record in NameCheap and pointing it to the IP address that was outputted in the previous step. If you are not using NameCheap please refer to your own domain provider for how to set up DNS.

In the Advanced DNS section add an A record for your domain and subdomain.

Set the value to the IP address that was outputted after provisioning.

Set TTL to 1minute.

Step 6- Restarting Forem Traefik Service

In this step you will reset Forem Traefik Service via SSH to generate a TLS cert.

In your terminal type:

ssh core@<SERVER IP ADDRESS>

replacing with your community name.

Here is an example using a community name:

If prompted to continue, type yes into your terminal.

Once you have connected to your Forem server, type the following command:

sudo systemctl restart forem-traefik.service

Now, you can navigate to your community domain. You should see a "Let's Start your Forem Journey" page.
You may need to wait a few minutes after running the Forem Traefik command.

Conclusion

Congratulations on setting up your first Forem!🎉

For next steps on how to configure your Forem please visit our Forem Admin Docs