New initiative: Improved Discourse integration

What is this initiative about?

I have two smallish requests which I'd like to combine into one (still small) initiative:

• Please deploy discourse2fedmsg in infrastructure (https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/9580)
• groups support for oauth2 for discourse (https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/9580)

Why this initiative?

Some aspects of Fedora asynchronous communication are moving to https://discussion.fedoraproject.org from mailing lists, and new and emerging discussion areas are originating there. We have a second instance, https://ask.fedoraproject.org/, focused on end-user help. These see significant use: the Discussion instance gets around 235,000 page views a month, and Ask about 435,000.

Currently, this infrastructure is disconnected from the Fedora Message bus, which means we can't combine with our normal usage metrics, notifications, or integrate with other tools like Badges.

Additionally, while Discourse has functionality to use groups from an SSO system, it doesn't work with Oauth2. Having group support would enable significant functionality without manually tracking groups in two places, and groups in Discourse can do many useful things.

Definition of success

What is the minimal outcome you would like to see from this initiative to be satisfied?

1. Events from discussion.fedoraproject.org and ask.fedoraproject.org put on the message bus.
2. Groups synced from FAS to discussion.fedoraproject.org (optionally also ask)

What are your nice or really nice to have wishes?

• A test instance of Discourse, or the ability to deploy one on demand. Our main servers are provided to us as SaaS, which is generally good, but we don't have an environment to test changes. A local developer deployment is of course possible but difficult to integrate with FAS for testing.

Area/community impacted

All of Fedora, although some groups (Council, Magazine, CoreOS, Silverblue, IoT) are using it more heavily than others.

CentOS currently does not use Discourse, but personally I think it'd be a good idea.

Dependencies

Do this initiative have any dependencies?

None

Skills needed?

• Familiarity with deploying services in Fedora Infrastructure
• Fedora Message Bus knowledge and skills
• Python for porting from fedmsg to the new thing
• General sysadmin skills for the Discourse test instance
• Bonus: Ruby programming knowledge for validating the test patches we already have
• Alternate route for groups: implement DiscourseConnect SSO in Ipsilon
• Alternate route for groups: Implement group sync from Noggin via Discourse API calls

Person who must or should be involved?

None

Other work that should be completed prior to this initiative?

None

Deadline

Is this initiative under a time-constraint? Should it start or end before a certain date?

No time constraint, just very nice to have.