Can i host forums on Netlify?

Here is my question, Can i host forums that are usable on Netlify ? Thanks.

No. You can’t. Unless the forum is based on just client-side languages like HTML, CSS, JS with no need for a server to actually render a page in real time, you can’t.

I have the same question! @hrishikesh do you mean that is not possible a forum with PHP and MySQL? like MyBB https://mybb.com/? Do you know which solution is possible as you point out? Sorry many questions! We are thinking if it worth to create a forum page for our github organization WebARKit.

Yes, it’s not possible to host such a forum on Netlify. You might have to look for PHP web hosts. You can then choose from free/paid ones depending on your requirements.

Yes i red this somewhere in the Netlify docs but i would a confirm, Do you know if it is possible to install other services like Discourse or Disqus? The problem with these solutions is the price and we cannot afford this type of expense . Thank you!

In short, none of that on Netlify, sadly.

EDIT: Disqus is possible as it’s a simple comment engine, I guess.

There is a Disqus plugin for gatsbyjs gatsby-plugin-disqus | Gatsby and since gatsbyjs can be built with Netlify, is a good option. The problem is that our website is Jekyll based, at the moment.
Disqus as is written in the docs, as a completely free option (Basic). Maybe there is a Jekyll plugin?

As long as Jekyll can use a simple HTML code, you don’t need any plugin. The last time I has used Disqus (in about 2015), all it needed was to add a simple <script> tag to my HTML code and it worked.

Hey @kalwalt
Look at caprover. It’s basically your own PaaS (like an open-source heroku).
You can get your forum up and running for a $5 server.

Thank you @hrishikesh i will test this.

Hi @s-kris didn’t know about caprover i will read the docs, Thank you!

I would think that any forum that you can run using APIs would work. @perry says that all of Netlify is hosted on Netlify, which would mean this community is on Netlify, which would be that it should be possible.

i was a little imprecise in my statement the other day - what i meant was that the netlify UI is built on netlify and deployed there, and www.netlify.com too.

This forum is not built or deployed on Netlify - instead, it is a hosted discourse forum.

I don’t know of a forum solution that runs on the jamstack at present, but, as technologies mature, it might someday be possible.

@perry You have to be careful what you say around the children.

can you handle the truth??

Love me a good Discourse forum

For others, and for reference, Discourse is an open source forum platform - you can find the source here:

The folks that created it also run Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc… perhaps better described as “Discourse, the company” - and they offer to host and manage your Discourse instance for you so you don’t have to do upgrades, maintenance, server allocations, etc. You can find pricing for that here: Discourse pricing | Discourse - Civilized Discussion

The product is exactly the same so there’s no feature difference. Just managing infrastructure.

All that said, could you make a JAMstack forum? Totally. You’d have to get pretty clever with it and go a couple steps further than your typical JAMstack-ported-app (a la redirects engine [self-plug: GitHub - jon-sully/thats-at: JAMstack, Static URL Shortener]) but you could do it.

The caveat there is that you’d want to constantly convert real-time comments on threads to static content delivered over the CDN which means that your site would be building. A lot. So if you were going to use something like Gatsby or Next->Static, that might be brutal for your Netlify bill since those SSGs are known for taking a bit of time compared to more simple-build SSGs like Hugo. Heck, you could even build your own in Rust or Dotnet Core or C++ now that Netlify Build supports Homebrew but the faster your build could churn through comments that have been posted but not yet built, the faster your forum’s comments would turn static and not have to be queried from folks’ front end browser code (although the latter would always happen to some degree if you want your forum to be truly real-time)

This goes down a deep and complex rabbit hole but would be a super fun project

Hope that spawns some ideas

–
Jon

Better than almost everyone else I know.