Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Oli
Oli

Posted on

Yet another Forem-based community successfully deployed and growing 🌱

Hi folks! I'm fairly new to the Forem.dev and want to share my sustainable living community - Forest and also express my gratitude towards the Forem core team as well as the really helpful community members like @lee and @akhil who wrote installation tutorials and shared their issues & solutions. Your posts were massively helpful during my setup. Thank you all!

The Forem team did an incredible job with the comprehensive Self-Host guide. The only issue I experienced was with URL redirecting.
For some reason, after installation when I navigate to domain.com I got an SSL error message. I had to type in www.domain.com to reach the site. Interestingly, this issue happened on all mobile browsers and all other browsers on the desktop other than Chrome. It was a bit of a head-scratcher for a while and after trying various things like adding an SSL cert to my droplet and modifying the SSL/TLS encryption mode and DNS forwarding & redirects on Cloudflare, I finally fixed it by creating this simple forwarding rule:

If URL matches: domain.com
Then the settings are:
Forwarding URL - 301 Permanent Redirect
https://www.domain.com

This is probably not the best fix but it works for me for now. I noticed that some people reported a similar issue in the past so I thought I'd share my solution.

Top comments (11)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Exciting!!

I can see that it is already a little out of date. We're working on clearer versioning and admin nudges to encourage folks to update more regularly, but in the meantime I'll do it here:

If you're running a self-hosted Forem, please update regularly because we're constantly smashing bugs and improving features. Waiting too long to update could be problematic. (I believe there may actually be an onboarding bug on the version you're running).

github.com/forem/selfhost#update-f...

sudo foremctl deploy
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Happy Foreming!

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oli profile image
Oli

Cheers, Ben. I did notice some some differences between my instance and forem.dev and dev.to

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yeah. You should continue updating periodically (at least once a week)... We will soon have a banner in admin to nag you, but in the meantime make it a habit. Updating is much easier than originally getting set up, but if you don't do it regularly it could potentially create bugs.

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rayan profile image
Rayan Nait Mazi

Hi @oli , great community !
I'm also doing self-host forem on DO and I had the same issue with the non-www. not working.
My fix was the same: set up a permanent redirect from domain.com to domain.com ;)

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oli profile image
Oli

Thanks Rayan! All the best with your community.

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lee profile image
Lee

Love it - i'll be signing up later. Great topic, just what Forem needed.

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oli profile image
Oli

Thank you!

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

This is a seriously great idea for a Forem. Just joined and am excited to see what I'm able to learn from this community!

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Nice one, @oli ! Congrats on getting your Forem up and running!

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oli profile image
Oli

Thank you, @ellativity . It's great to have you in our community.

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akhil profile image
Akhil Naidu

That's a nice community, and I'm glad that my posts helped you.