Author: Daniel

By changing a domain’s DNS I ended up with curl: (6) Could not resolve host issue. I lost a couple of hours before I resolved. The post is all about how resolved the issue.

I recently installed Vanilla forum on TapThatBrain.com. I wanted Vanilla to send out emails when I register users from Vanilla’s dashboard.

The cloud web hosting that I use doesn’t come with a mail server out the box. So I thought of using a SMTP relay service. Using a SMTP relay service demanded changing the domain’s DNS eventually leading me to the issue — curl: (6) Could not resolve host issue.

I took the following approach before I finally resolved the issue.

1. At first, I thought I messed up my nginx configurations. But my configuration was set up to listen both locations — tapthatbrain.com and www.tapthatbrain.com. So my nginx config was good. Did you know? You can use command line to verify if nginx configurations are in place before reloading the nginx server. Learn how.
2. I noticed that when I go to tapthatbrin.com, I was redirected to www.tapthatbrain.com and I wanted to find out where the redirection comes from — nginx, certbot or WordPress. Did you know? You can use curl -I tapthatbrain.com to identify the HTTP response using the command line.
3. The redirection was clearly not from my nginx configuration.
4. WordPress may possibly cause the redirection. The values of WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL in WordPress were www.tapthatbrain.com. But I wasn’t sure if WordPress caused the redirection. So I used WP CLI to update the value to tapthatbrain.com. But the redirection continued to happen.
5. Finally, Certbot’s configuration in nginx made the redirection. In that case I know I should be able to access the website using www.tapthatbrain.com. But I was not able to access using the www version.
6. So, my next thought was the router’s DNS cache. Since I use Jio Fiber connection, I followed the steps listed at https://www.reliancedigital.in/solutionbox/how-to-change-your-dns-to-browse-faster-and-safer/ to clear the DNS cache at router level. But clearing the DNS cache at router level didn’t help.
7. I thought of accessing the both versions (www and the non-www) of the website using a different internet connection. Fortunately, I was able to access both versions using my mobile data.
8. That meant something went wrong at Ubuntu (or system) level. Ubuntu couldn’t resolve the DNS. A quick search on Stack Overflow reveled a solution that worked.

Once I updated the /etc/resolve.conf file, I was able to access both versions of the website tapthatbrain.com from my Ubuntu machine.

This issue could seem naive for someone with decent Ubuntu skills. However, I don’t feel I’m put to shame for sharing this instance. Instead, I see this as learning opportunity.

Today, I’m grateful to all my mentors for all their motivation. They made me stronger each day.

Being a long time user of WordPress, I love the pretty permalink feature. This feature in WordPress works out of the box.

I started using Vanilla recently on a website that I run and manage and found that the forum application is not using pretty permalinks.

I could have used nginx server blocks to rewrite the URLs using the rewrite directive but before that I wanted to find out if Vanilla ships with this feature, out of the box.

Turns out that Vanilla’s pretty permalink feature can be enabled using the config like shown in https://stackoverflow.com/a/53923139/5569979

Set the following config in /conf/config-defaults.php

$Configuration['Garden']['RewriteUrls'] = true;

That’s all you need to do. If pretty permalinks don’t work for you then make sure to get the nginx configuration right. Read Vanilla — A BBPress Alternative to learn more about nginx configuration for Vanilla.

I needed a searchable knowledge base, a forum, to use on Tap That Brain website. At first, BBPress looked like a great option. But it turned out to be ineffective with the block based theme I use called Quadrat.

Stack Overflow for Teams was next on my list. However, I didn’t like the fact that my users have to leave my website to find information. So I had to explore further.

I ran into thread, titled “Looking for alternatives“, on BBPress forum. Crazy, isn’t it? However, that thread made me realize how a forum can foster community interactions.

I found Ipstenu’s comment in the thread. Ipstenu is a well known name in the WordPress space. So I was more inclined to explore her list of alternatives. Out of the many options, I chose to go with Vanilla. I like the fact that Vanilla is a open source software.

Things to consider

1. TapThatBrain.com is powered by WordPress. I have installed WordPress application on the root directory. For the sake of understanding, let us assume that the root directory is /var/www/tapthatbrain.com/
2. I would like to have a forum at TapThatBrain.com/forum

Installation

Download the Vanilla application from https://open.vanillaforums.com/download. From their documentation, installation appeared to be simple. But it wasn’t the case with me.

Unzip the downloaded file at /var/www/tapthatbrain.com/forum and navigate to TapThatBrain.com/forum on the browser to complete the installation.

Setting up the nginx server block was quite challenging. Vanilla’s documentation has listed the config to be included with nginx. However, I had to tweak it a bit to get it working with my setup.

NGINX configuration

Here’s how I got Vanilla working alongside WordPress. In my case, I know all forum requests are routed through TapThatBrain.com/forum/

NGINX cannot process PHP files. We use FastCGI to handle PHP processing. I shall talk more about this in a minute. But let us see how I handle all /forum/ requests before that.

Handling the /forum/ requests.

location /forum/ {
  try_files $uri $uri/ index.php$is_args$args;
}

The above statement matches all requests made to /forum/ and executes the file. If the file isn’t available, it executes the folder. If the folder isn’t available then it executes index.php and passes any $args received.

The above block worked great at first. However, I needed to handle requests like /forum/categories/, /forum/discussions/, etc.

location /forum/ {
  try_files $uri $uri/ @vanilla;
}

location @vanilla {
  rewrite ^/forum/(.*)$ /forum/index.php?p=$1 last;
}

The goal of the above block is to rewrite the URLs like /forum/categories/ and /forum/discussions/ and rewrite them as TapThatBrain.com/forum/index.php?p=discussions and you get the idea.

We want the rewrite to happen because these URLs are dynamic and are not actual pages. You can read more about the last keyword mentioned in the rewrite directive.

FastCGI PHP processing

In order to process PHP files, we use FastCGI. Pass the fastcgi_pass value and the processing should kick in.

location /forum/ {
  location /forum/index\.php$ {
    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /forum/index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root/index.php;
    fastcgi_param X_REWRITE 1;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
  }

  try_files $uri $uri/ @vanilla;
}

location @vanilla {
  rewrite ^/forum/(.*)$ /forum/index.php?p=$1 last;
}

A nested location block is added for the FastCGI processing. The nested location block looks for the /forum/index.php. Now I have to re-route all requests via index.php file.

I would soon update this post about re-routing requests via index.php

With this current setup, I will be able to let Tap That Brain users access a forum without leaving the website.

If you’re curious, checkout the forum at https://www.tapthatbrain.com/forum/