Installing NodeBB on Google Cloud Platform

Raydekk

Hey everyone,

I've installed nodeBB on a virtual machine on Google Cloud Platform. My config file is:
{
"url": "http://google_external_ip:4567",
"secret": "xxx",
"database": "mongo",
"mongo": {
"host": "google_internal_ip",
"port": "27017",
"username": "",
"password": "",
"database": "nodebb"
}
}

./nodebb dev has no errors
./nodebb start works, and ./nodebb log says the server is listening

The only warnings i get are:
10/9 14:44 [14936] - warn: You have no mongo password setup!
warn: [socket.io] Clustering detected, you are advised to configure Redis as a websocket store.

I'm not using redis, so I don't think the warnings above are an issue. The installation completed successfully, and nodebb created its collections in the mongodb database.

I've tried multiple restarts of nodeBB, trying with google's external IP, internal IP, localhost and 127.0.0.1 (mongodb only works with the internal IP), also with bind_address set to each of the above.

Still, I can't access http://external_ip:4567, it just gives a timeout.

Firewall rules are set to allow port 4567 both tcp and udp. I'm also running a nodejs server and nginx restarts it whenever it's down/reboot. I'm forwarding all requests from port 80 to port 8000(node.js's port). I can access my angular application @ http://google_external_ip/
I've also tried disabling and stopping node.js and nginx, but I still can't access nodebb.

Any ideas on how to debug this?

Thanks,
Raydekk

drew

When you did

./nodebb setup

when it asked about your server did you put
http://externalIP

or did you leave it at localhost?

Raydekk

Yes I used the external_ip:4567.
I ran the setup multiple times with external_ip:port and internal_ip:port. I don't think I ran the setup with localhost and 127.0.0.1 but I did change the config.json file with all these values for the url parameter and restarted nodebb.

Doesn't modifying the json and then restarting nodebb have the same output as running setup?

Robert

Running setup downloads some additional files and does some more work in the back. You're fine editing the config if setup is atleast done once before

Raydekk

ok, I think I solved it.

Apparently, after executing commands like

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-masquerade --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-forward-port=port=80:proto=tcp:toport=8000 --permanent
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8000

somewhat screwed up the firewall rules in the google console. The catch was that I could only acces the website from port 80, by trying to acces it from 8000(node's actual) didn't work. I deleted the rules, and added them again in the platform console (Networking->Firewall rules) and then restarted nodebb and it worked!

manoj

Here's how I got NodeBB up and running on the Google Cloud Platform.
The following are the steps I took:

Created VPC firewall rule with 4567 port.
Deployed Compute Engine VM Instance with Ubuntu Pro 20.04
Install NodeBB via the Web Interface.
Install Let's Encrypt Wildcard SSL on Nginx.

The documentation for setting up NodeBB on Compute Engine can be found here.
[Installing NodeBB on Compute Engine] (https://www.incapio.com/post/install-nodebb-forum-on-compute-engine-google-cloud-gcp)