Other Side of The Coin: Discourse Install and Setup

I was wanting to keep things separate between NodeBB and Discourse in the talking points between them. Discourse is on the same level as NodeBB as far as both being free open-source projects that can be installed on your own hardware or rented servers hosted elsewhere. That's where they start to deviate from one another.

Discourse Requirements

I didn't cover the requirements for NodeBB as they are much smaller than what is required for Discourse. This isn't a knock on Discourse at all, but rather a fact that you'll need to consider when looking at server components.

For Discourse to run, you need a server that has at least 4GB of memory. This is the minimum requirement for the software and something I had forgotten about when I started this little experiment. Luckily for me, I'm using Hetzner's servers, which are the right fit for just about anything you can think of. The server I've been using over the past few years was one of the lower-cost tiers, offering at most 4GB of memory. This wouldn't be able to handle Discourse and NodeBB running on the same server. So, it was a simple process of shutting down the server, moving up one tier, and bringing the newly updated server back online.

Install and Setup

Just like with NodeBB, the install process is handled entirely through Cloudron's system. I know that for many FOSS purists, you should only interact with your server via the command line, but for the rest of us, we are blessed with systems that help keep the administration workload down as much as possible. This allows us to focus more of our attention on creating content.

For Discourse, there are a few items you have to change in order to have a more secured admin account. For one thing, the process of changing out the default email account is a bit more involved than simply changing it in the account preferences. You do have to go through the command line, but it's only a few lines of commands you need to input. For Cloudron users, the process documentation is easy to follow when copying the prompts into the command line.

The difference between NodeBB and Discourse that I've found so far is that Discourse handles the email side of things better. User account changes like password resets and the like are handled through Discourse itself. With NodeBB, you are highly encouraged to set up a mail system through a service like Mailgun. I was genuinely impressed with Discourse in this regard, as I didn't want to go through the process of adding MX records again in my domain DNS settings. It's not a difficult process, but more of a hassle of adding the content and waiting for DNS propagation to work through the wider internet.

Plugin Support

This is the area in which the chasm between both NodeBB and Discourse becomes much wider. Discourse has been around for quite some time, and there has been a much larger presence of plugin developers and development done for the software. Plugins are much more prevalent and easier to find, and for many, they are kept up to date. For much of what I was looking into, like S3 Uploads and the ActivityPub plugin, it was already found within the core of the forum software. S3 Uploads are found easily within the admin settings and just needed me to enter the information for it to start working.

For the ActivityPub plugin, there is a process in which you have to install the plugin. This goes for all other plugins during the installation process by going back into the command line. Again, luckily for us on the Cloudron system, there is documentation to guide through this process. I mention this because the process is very similar to how those with self-hosted Discourse on their own hardware or VPS would do it. With Cloudron, there is a slightly different direction to the process.

Getting these two features up and running was quite fast and didn't require a ton of time for tinkering.

Closing

Going through this experiment with both NodeBB and Discourse, I wanted to see the differences between each forum software and what was required in order to get things up and running. Just like anything in life, there are some differences between them, but nothing that would make one think one is definitively better than the other. Yes, there are differences, especially in the plugin department. That would have to be up to the person who is looking into whichever software they are interested in using, weighing the pros and cons for the future of the community they want to build.

In my case, I would have to say that NodeBB leads against Discourse as far as server resources needed are concerned. NodeBB is much leaner in this regard but does fall short when considering the plugin ecosystem, particularly in terms of the number of plugins available.