WARNING:

Commento is discontinued and not getting updates anymore. I recommend switching to Comentario, a fork of Commento that I'm actively developing.

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Auto-deployable Commento server

This is a sample repository containing a self-sufficient Commento instance running on Docker Compose and using free auto-renewable SSL/TLS certificates provided by Let's Encrypt.

💡 Curious about how this works? Read a detailed explanation here.

Using this as a starting point, you can set up a self-hosted Commento instance in a matter of minutes.

Prerequisites

1. You own a domain and a Linux server
2. You have root shell access to the server

Step-by-step instructions

1. Install Docker and docker-compose
2. Clone the project code to /opt/commento, for example:

   sudo git clone https://github.com/yktoo/commento-docker-compose.git /opt/commento

3. Edit /opt/commento/docker-compose.yml and update the environment variable values appropriately
4. Recommended: pre-build and pre-pull the required images:

   cd /opt/commento
   docker-compose -p commento pull
   docker-compose -p commento build

5. Create systemd service symlink, reload the daemon, enable and start the service:

   sudo ln -s /opt/commento/etc/commento.service /etc/systemd/system/commento.service
   sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   sudo systemctl enable commento.service
   sudo systemctl start commento.service

6. Check the service health with systemctl status commento.service
7. Recommended: check in your changes to a new git repository for future use

Cleaning up

To stop and clean containers up manually (comments and SSL/TLD certificates are always retained):

cd /opt/commento
docker-compose -p commento down -v

Upgrading

To rebuild the Docker images, for example if you want to upgrade to a newer version of Commento/PostgreSQL/Nginx:

cd /opt/commento
docker-compose -p commento pull
docker-compose -p commento build
# Restart the service
sudo systemctl restart commento.service

Backing up

To back up the database, the easiest way is to make a dump of the commento database.

First, set up a passwordless login to your server using public key authentication.

Then you can export the entire commento database using the command:

ssh YOUR_SERVER_HOST docker exec -t commento_postgres_1 pg_dump -U postgres -d commento > /path/to/dump.sql