@markcarey did you get anywhere with this? Hitting the exact same problem

I'd add some client side code that checks for the cookie existing, and react (redirect) appropriately

I think I figured this out after trying to run it locally, The Heroku install steps say to add the follow dependencies to you package.json: "dependencies": { ... "nodebb-plugin-dbsearch": "0.0.10", "redis": "~0.10.1", "connect-redis": "~2.0.0" }, "devDependencies": { But looking closer, nodebb-plugin-dbsearch is already in the package.json at a higher version. This conflict seemed to cause the crash. I am guessing that recent versions of nodeBB have changed so this part of the doc is no longer applicable. Here is a pull request to adjust the docs, if I am correct in this assumption: https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-english/pull/51