Using Trellis just as a means to spin up+deploy servers

So Trellis is the only exposure I’ve had to Vagrant, virtual box, Ubuntu, cloud hosting, etc.

I’ve got a site which has nothing to do with WordPress, but wants to use Discourse forum. I’m considering using a fresh Trellis setup and throwing Discourse in there. Just as a familiar way to setup a local environment and deploy it to a cloud host.

Is this foolishness? Overkill? Feedback appreciated :smiley:

Discourse uses Docker so I don’t think it makes sense in that case.

I have used Trellis to spin up/deploy servers for both static HTML sites as well as a Laravel app.

I had toyed around with the same thing, though I was deploying Discourse in conjunction with the WordPress portion of Trellis; it’s certainly doable, but really what you’re talking about is using Ansible, not Trellis. One way to go about it might be to clone/fork Trellis, and strip out everything WordPress specific, though I’d suggest trying to create a separate Ansible project and just referring to Trellis to copy parts that are useful - that’d probably be quicker/easier.

When it comes to the setup tool, my thought is to modify a template app.yml file ahead of time, which is probably easier than trying to have Ansible deal with user input.

Ansible has a few digital ocean modules which will come in handy if you’re trying to spin up servers on DO.

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