I fixed my own issue. Apparently some install scripts fail when run as root (or with sudo). I'm not sure why this is the case, but I got everything to work by running sudo chown -R ralph:www-data /path/to/nodebb && ./nodebb upgrade as a standard user.

I think running ./nodebb upgrade is actually applicable to all NodeBB versions now. Should make the appropriate changes to docs @PitaJ ...

@RalphORama Yeah Cloudflare doesn't support websockets unless you're on one of the two top tiers, pro or business I believe.