What is the best practice approach to set up a Wordpress site with a Discourse Community subdirectory, from scratch?

I’m starting from scratch and have read dozens of tutorials and am trying to figure out the best approach for a novice to build a WP site with Discourse on the same droplet, as a subdirectory (not a subdomain, if possible). I also want to make sure i’m not missing any critical components.

WP Site: sitename.com Discourse Community: sitename.com/community

Here’s some things I want to make sure I get right… out of the gate:

1. I want to be sure that I’m adding the proper layer of security
2. I want to make sure I am setting up the DNS properly for these two diff tools
3. I want to make sure my SSL certs are in place for both tools (or maybe I only need for the main domain ¯\ (ツ)/¯ )
4. I’ve read a bit about caching and I want to make sure that’s set up to optimize the UX

From what I’ve looked up, here’s the process I’m looking at following:

1. Create a new Droplet
2. Install and Deploy a LEMP stack (should I use this 55 second method?)
3. Then I was thinking that I should set up 2 Server blocks (or Virtual Hosts) as outlined here: How To Set Up Nginx Server Blocks (Virtual Hosts) on Ubuntu 16.04
4. Then install Wordpress on one server block?
5. Then install Discourse on another server block?

My trouble is that there is sooooo much great info (tutorials) in these forums/documentation but I don’t know which documentation to follow, in which order… b/c I couldn’t figure out the best order of operations here.

PS. I’m understanding most of what I’m reading as I’ve been learning about the LEMP stack and NGINX, etc. but I don’t have any expereince with backend development. I have a moderate to advanced understanding of HTML and CSS and a theoretical understanding of Javascript… but that’s it!

Would I do well to install and run this stuff through a WHM/cPanel?

I just divorced GoDaddy shared hosting and am excited to build my site on a VPS droplet here, with DigitalOcean!