Just an update to note that I've bailed on SmartOS and PostgreSQL due to too many bumps in the road in favor of sticking with a well supported platform. Which pretty much translates to: "what the dev heads are using...".

I use fbsd for our in house stuff that I keep updated via build server and internal lan. When I need cloud scale smartos or linux are the best options. To wit I have not even tried fbsd and pgsql so cannot weigh in there.

Thanks for all the insights. I'll probably be back to bug ya' before too long.

o/

@scottalanmiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

@Joykiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

I personally hate Discourse due to their docker wrapper. but thats me.

Oh gosh, that would pretty much turn me away right there. Docker is great for devs, but makes little sense for production operations. Tends to come from shops that are run by devs and have little operational knowledge or experience. We just had a discussion about that last week in our forum: https://mangolassi.it/topic/19577/docker-for-production-use-of-third-party-software/

Docker is for lamers who don't know how to be system admins

And, of course, rapid development. When Docker first started making it's appearance I embraced it but was later aghast when folks started routinely deploying to production, and predicted to some buddies that some security nightmares were just around the corner... And they were.

But enough Docker bashing. I looked at Discourse long, long ago, in a far away galaxy (well, in Internet time, anyways). Ruled it out right away for following (admittedly highly opinionated) reasons:

• Docker centric: Now that I am primarily only on my own projects, I am free to abandon Linux in favor of what I consider to be superior OS's like FreeBSD and SmartOS. Nothing personal but platform lockin equates to vendor lockin. And that just ain't freedom enough for me

• Rails vs. NodeJS: Are you kidding? Was an early adopter of Rails back, circa 2003/4 or so? It rocked at that time as an alternative to then php stuff sporting the serious security hole of the day/week. Or so it seemed - php was pretty sketchy for a while there. Fast forward a decade and a half and it's freakin' no contest! Rails is all but history/legacy, at least in my mind.

• Main Dev Heads: Cool vs kind arrogant asshats (sounds like that may have changed). This was immediately off putting and I was kind of surprised Discourse became so popular, but I guess that's one thing fame will help you with.

So... note to the NodeBB devs:

Please do keep doing what YOU do best and do not worry too much about feature parity w/what, in my view, is an inferior, non starter platform just because they've got a few extra bells, whistles, and/or mindshare. Popularity more oft than not does NOT equal technical superiority but rather merely demonstrates whos' the better con men. Err.. marketing team....

Now obviously I do not mean to preclude a bit of cross pollination when it makes sense. But I have been around long enough to observe FOSS project loose their vision in the quest for "Feature Parity" with some perceived competition. So, just weighing in w/my $0.02 to encourage you to stay true to your vision. Cuz it's been workin' pretty good fer' me ;D

And finally, in closing, the astute may have noticed I enjoy making tongue in cheek comments from time to time for the humor value. Don't get yer' beak too tweaked, eh? It's not a religion for me.

Much thanks to @scottalanmiller for the advice and an embarrassing amount of hand holding. I'm now rocking an nginx tls proxied nodebb sporting Centos7, mongodb, and redis for session management.

I'm curious to know if any nodebb gurus are serving up nodebb via nginx https enabled reverse proxy and using modsecurity?

@zaasmi said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

With vastly more people becoming aware of privacy concerns, ever more increasing numbers of people transitioning to VPN's, along with the plethora of free VPN providers coming online nowadays, one take any such stats with a large dose of salt, eh?

One reason I put little to no stock in "analytics". These days.

@julian

Excellent and very well composed, Julian. I have been out of managing community spaces for a while and took a pass on social engineering, errr.. I mean networking, sites in general. Hence a bit out of the modern loop, so to speak. Your blog post was timely - elaborates and illuminates a related discussion I was having on irc just last night (private chan, not nodebb).

Good stuff, particularly w.r.t. the ephemeral. Another fall out I am noticing that I ascribe to sites like NitWit and Facebark is that folks no longer seem capable and/or willing to even post up actual sentences, much less string them together into coherent thoughts. Serial "post whoring" seems to be more the order of the day. I don't think these people realize such, but has actual coherent conversation and discussion become a lost "art", displaced by what essentially amount to click bait posts?

This forum obviously attracts a more technical audience so, no, I am not dissing anybody here.

Deserves a Hooray!

So rather than just bitch about it, I spun up a freshie SmartOS (18.3) instance and endeavored to install NodeBB as per explained via docs that are admittedly a bit dated here: https://docs.nodebb.org/installing/os/smartos/

Prior to 1.10.2 these worked dandy (adjusting fer' some updatin').

Alas, not any more. v1.10.1, enter, stage left, sharp:

./nodebb setup starts spewin' about sharp, wh/tracks back to libvips, wh/does not seem to exist in Joyent's SmartOS pkgsrc (used by smartos, netbsd, dragonflybsd, etc.) repos. So, uh, the fallback to build from src flails about, thrashing mesirably in futile efforts to resuscitate itself... but I digress.

Hence the wannabe NodeBB on SmartOS innocent must either do some crunchin' and a munchin' of libvips src else nag OhJoy's pkgsrc team, eh? Fun, fun, fun ;-/

I suppose I should investigate v1.10.2 on FreeBSD, eh?

Alrighty then! We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Rock on o/

P.S.; I saved logs but as this appears to be a sharp/libvips/nodejs on SmartOS issue I didn't figure y'all would be too intrigued. Peace, out o/

@scottalanmiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

But there is an ecosystem of being behind the times, and not thinking through how the technology is going to play out once you actually want to deploy.

Indubitably. Hitting the nail square on the head here.

Awesome.

Thanks bunches for this.

fwiw:

For the few, the brave, who may be interested, I built libvips pkgsrc port for SmartOS. It works in my testing and I expect it will be merged upstream so binaries should be coming.

So now I can install nodejs sharp dependency and run nodebb again.

Nice ;D

P.S.; This is w/nodejs-10.11.0, and yes, it does also need zlib.

@roy-miller

Well, maybe you don't get precisely the option you prefer baked in but you may want to explore the alternatives, wh/at the least provide something rather than a blank "No one has replied". I favor the "Last - Show the latest post, including original post, if no replies" variant, wh/displays a leadin teaser snippet from the original post if no replies. Teaser is aptly named as provides a "taste" of what the thread may be about.

Otherwise... I gots nothin' for ya.... Good luck!

Maybe not a lot of interest in this due to complexity of deploying/configuring ModSecurity, combined w/absence of nodebb stack specific rulesets. Security is difficult so not much can be done about the deploy/config aspects but ModSecurity devs are starting to focus some efforts on the latter.

For those interested, and willing to roll up their sleeves, development of node.js targeted attack ruleset is slated for next release of OWASP CRS, scheduled for Sept. 2019. More info here:

https://github.com/SpiderLabs/owasp-modsecurity-crs/pull/1487#issuecomment-519071541

P.S.; Obviously ModSecurity can be deployed on Apache setups as well but my sense is that Nginx is the overwhelming favorite w/the nodebb community and I didn't want to start a new thread.

@roy-miller

Not sure about the first. Did you do a "nodebb update" prior to the restart?

As for the second: ACP -> Settings -> Post. Set "Teaser" to suit.

Good luck!

Caught a Netflix Original Red Sea Diving Resort recently. Based on true story. Besides that you pretty much got to check out anything Ben Kingsley. Pretty good.

@Zahid-Asim Obviously not firewall issue else all requests accessing via port xyz would be blockaded. Hence => must be something configuration side: Either yours or Cloudflare.

Maybe try(??):

location ~^/ads.txt {
root /var/www/nodebb/public/;
}

I don't use Cloudflare so no clue what might be happening on their end. Good luck.

P.S.; Otherwise you need to post your entire nginx.conf cuz despite my best efforts I is not a mind reader.

Not AWS specific but maybe this is what you're looking for? Should be able to get you there.

Hell's bells... No clue why that link a'la old school markdown syntax is broken. Try this:

Ubuntu (Recommended) - NodeBB Documentation

Not an nginx guru so please bear with me here.

• For simplicity sake let's assume site lives at forums.example.com rather than a example.com/forums subfolder.

• Unless specified otherwise, nginx root dir is /usr/share/nginx/html

• Nodebb nginx configuration docs utilize this when describing setting up a custom error page.

• Nginx is being used exclusively as reverse proxy and not serving any additional sites. I think I read somewhere that under such configuration an explicit default server docroot should not be specified? But even in such cases I think the hard coded default /usr/share/nginx/html still serves up 50x.html error page.

• In absence of a custom error page, nodebb uses nodebb/public/503.html?

• Nginx has been configured for scaling.

• Nginx Pitfalls and Common Mistakes documentation suggest putting doc root inside a location block is bad practice even though it will work.

Soo... now my question... taking all of above into consideration.. what is proper/correct best practice configuration for a "scaled" nginx nodebb deployment? I know what "could" work. I am curious what "should" be recommended best practice.

(Yeah, I know I already posted this in a different thread but it was a mistake at the time not to have started a new thread because this is pretty specific w.r.t. best practices configuration rather than "why isn't my stuff isn't working" question. Apologies for that.)

@Zahid-Asim

Looks like you are getting a Ray ID error. I might guess you're hosting some stuff via Cloudflare? In wh/case maybe this helps.

In any event, impossible to guess w/o more details. Good luck. o/

@julian Appreciate the clue bat, Julian. Good to know. Working on my onion.

I have been a bit curious about this as well. Not an nginx guru so please bear with me here.

• For simplicity sake let's assume site lives at forums.example.com rather than a example.com/forums subfolder.

• Unless specified otherwise, nginx root dir is /usr/share/nginx/html

• Nodebb nginx configuration docs utilize this when describing setting up a custom error page

• Nginx is being used exclusively as reverse proxy and not serving any additional sites. I think I read somewhere that under such configuration an explicit default server docroot should not be specified? But even in such cases I think the hard coded default /usr/share/nginx/html still serves up 50x.html error page.

• In absence of a custom error page, nodebb uses nodebb/public/503.html?

• Nginx has been configured for scaling.

• Nginx Pitfalls and Common Mistakes documentation suggest putting doc root inside a location block is bad practice even though it will work.

Soo... now my question... taking all of above into consideration.. what is proper/correct best practice, eh?

P.S.; Maybe should have started a new thread proper under Technical Support. Please feel free to fork.