Uploads to external storage

Product Support

AI-generated summary

A user, Lander0606, is trying to move Discourse uploads to an external CIFS storage on a self-hosted instance. After mounting the share and updating the app.yml configuration, images return 404 errors. pfaffman suggests the correct volume setup, which Lander0606 confirms works when the correct permissions (_default_hostname:www-data) are set. However, uploads in topics don’t work even after copying the uploads folder correctly, requiring re-upload. pfaffman finds this unusual and suggests checking the database URLs with Uploads.pluck(:url) to identify potential issues, possibly caused by prior configuration changes or a failed rebake.

1

Hi all,

I’m trying to change the Discourse uploads location to an external storage location on my self-hosted instance due to space constraints. I have a CIFS share mounted and already copied all existing uploads with the same directory structure to the mounted location.

Then, I added the following lines to the app.yml:

- volumes:
  - volume:
      host: /<storage-location>/uploads
      guest: /shared/uploads

After rebuilding the container with ./launcher rebuild app (I’m the root user), the images are not visible anymore on the website. I appears that they all return a code 404.

I tried mounting the CIFS share as root:root and _default_hostname:www-data, but every time, images don’t show up.

What is the best (or correct) way to perform this change of locations for uploads?

Thanks in advance guys!

2

Here is what is the default:

volumes:
  - volume:
      host: /var/discourse/shared/standalone
      guest: /shared

You probably want something like this:

volumes:
  - volume:
      host: /var/discourse/shared/standalone
      guest: /shared
  - volume:
      host: /your/cifs/share/discourse-uploads
      guest: /shared/uploads
3

True! I tried it that way, and it worked, just keeping in mind that the mounted storage location must have the right permissions. root:root doesn’t work, but _default_hostname:www-data seems to work.

Another thing I noticed: uploads in topics, even with moving them to the new storage location, don’t work anymore and have to be re-uploaded. Other images/uploads (logos, headers etc) work fine.

Thanks!

4

That shouldn’t be. Maybe you copied the files to the wrong place.

5

I was thinking that too, but I double checked that I copied the whole uploads folder from shared/standalone/ to my external storage location, including the default and other sub folders.

It’s important to mention that I tried a few times to change the uploads location with different configurations for the external storage (mostly different file and folder permissions) and in between executed a rake posts:rebake in an attempt to let the attachments work again, and maybe somewhere in between the problem occurred…

6

It’s strange that uploading it again fixes it.

You can look at Uploads.pluck(:url) in rails and see if there’s something strange there.