Create Your Server
The dashboard requires a “Server” entry for each server it manages. The first step is creating that server so you can connect your site to it.
Creating your first server
On the home page (if you have no servers configured) click the Get Started! button on the Rebuilds When You Need Them plan:
Creating an Additional Server
If you already have an existing server, you can go to the servers page and click the Manage Existing Discourse Instance button:
Configuring the Dashboard for Your Server
Now you’ll need to fill in your Discourse Hostname:
Enter your Discourse hostname in the blank, scroll down, and click the Save to Continue button.
Installing the Dashboard’s SSH key
After you’ve entered your hostname, you’re ready to install the Dashboard’s ssh key on your server. Now you’ll need to connect to your server’s command line. This might be through the Digital Ocean control panel, an SSH command in your terminal, or through some other SSH tool like PuTTY.
on the right-hand panel, under the Adopting an existing server section is a wget
command; It’s too long to display in that window, but when you mouse over it, you’ll see a select icon. Click it!
Now over on your server command line, you’ll paste in that command. It’ll look something like this:
wget -O - https://dashboard.literatecomputing.com/pfaffmanager/ssh-key/test1.myforum.us >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
When you do that, the dashboard will try to connect to your server, and create an API key that it will use to connect to your Discourse server to see what plugins you are running and get other important data.
After the dashboard has retrieved and installed the Discourse API Key, you should see something like this (you might need to reload to make some of the fields go away):
At this point, you can click the green button to purchase services or join the Free Trial Group to try it out on your own. We at Literate Computing use the Dashboard for most of our Discourse tasks, but sometimes something is wrong that requires expertise or an edge case that the scripts are not prepared for. If you are a free trial member, you are responsible for resolving any problems with your site.
With Paid support, if there is a problem with an upgrade or anything else, we will help you get your site back up and running as soon as possible.