Before asking, did you search first? Press :magnifying_glass_tilted_left: at the upper right to search Hello, I first want to thank you for any support you may offer. With that being said, I would like to discuss my issue and then my goals for my self-hosted Discourse instance. Problem I currently use Hetzner as my server that is hosting a discourse instance. I have attached volumes for Uploads , Backups. The current Docker containers and images, as well as the app.yml and etc, are hosted on the server itself under /var/discourse. I have had this server over the course of 3-4+ years, and throughout that time, I have always run into the issue with space on the server itself (not volumes). Anytime I wanted to rebuild the app or relaunch the app, I would run into space issues as it would install the images and Docker containers to the local server rather than a volume. I would constantly need to remove Docker and any images/containers and do a fresh reinstall so I can rebuild. I also believe the SQL data is attached to the local server instead of a volume. Goals I am not sure what would be best for me going forward. Is it moving specific folders or files to a new volume for the Postgres DB and Docker images, and if so, I would love support on how to do that? Or starting from scratch with a fresh server, creating a backup of the server, and restoring on a new server with all volumes in properly configured locations? With all this being said, I would love some support on configuring the app.yml to properly have volumes for everything that takes up space, so I can individually scale when backups, uploads, db, or docker images, for example, need it. I can provide my app.yml file later today, as I am currently at work and looking to get ahead of the game.

I do my discourse hosting on AWS, and I have had great success so far in keeping /var/discourse on its own mountable EBS volume and attaching that volume to different EC2 instances as I’ve needed to migrate. I even fully changed architecture from x64 to ARM (I switched EC2 instances from a t3a.large to an r7g.large) and after re-mounting the /var/discourse volume, I was back online after a simple launcher rebuild app even with the architecture switch. Bottom line, if your /var/discourse is stored in a mountable volume, then you have the entire state of your forum in an essentially swing-mountable state. As long as you can set up a host and install docker on it, you can mount /var/discourse to it, run a launcher rebuild app, and be up and running. (Assuming things like hostname and other stuff specified in app.yml remain constant between hosts.)

Could you possibly provide a example app.yml for this setup? As well as is it as simple as a move from “/var/discourse” content to a different volume or do I need to clone the repo into the new volume. What also about the database files?

Here’s a sanitized copy of my current working app.yml: ## this is the all-in-one, standalone Discourse Docker container template ## ## After making changes to this file, you MUST rebuild ## /var/discourse/launcher rebuild app ## ## BE *VERY* CAREFUL WHEN EDITING! ## YAML FILES ARE SUPER SUPER SENSITIVE TO MISTAKES IN WHITESPACE OR ALIGNMENT! ## visit http://www.yamllint.com/ to validate this file as needed templates: - "templates/postgres.template.yml" - "templates/redis.template.yml" - "templates/web.template.yml" - "templates/web.ratelimited.template.yml" - "templates/web.ssl.template.yml" - "templates/web.letsencrypt.ssl.template.yml" - "templates/cloudflare.template.yml" ## which TCP/IP ports should this container expose? ## If you want Discourse to share a port with another webserver like Apache or nginx, ## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/17247 for details expose: - "80:80" # http - "443:443" # https params: db_default_text_search_config: "pg_catalog.english" ## Set db_shared_buffers to a max of 25% of the total memory. ## will be set automatically by bootstrap based on detected RAM, or you can override db_shared_buffers: "4096MB" ## can improve sorting performance, but adds memory usage per-connection db_work_mem: "40MB" ## Which Git revision should this container use? (default: tests-passed) #version: tests-passed env: LC_ALL: en_US.UTF-8 LANG: en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE: en_US.UTF-8 # DISCOURSE_DEFAULT_LOCALE: en ## How many concurrent web requests are supported? Depends on memory and CPU cores. ## will be set automatically by bootstrap based on detected CPUs, or you can override ## Changed by Lee on 2025/8/2 # UNICORN_WORKERS: 8 UNICORN_WORKERS: 10 ## TODO: The domain name this Discourse instance will respond to ## Required. Discourse will not work with a bare IP number. DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME: discourse.spacecityweather.com ## TODO: List of comma delimited emails that will be made admin and developer ## on initial signup example 'user1@example.com,user2@example.com' DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS: [redacted] ## TODO: The SMTP mail server used to validate new accounts and send notifications # SMTP ADDRESS is required # WARNING: SMTP password should be wrapped in quotes to avoid problems DISCOURSE_SMTP_ADDRESS: [redacted] DISCOURSE_SMTP_PORT: [redacted] DISCOURSE_SMTP_USER_NAME: [redacted] DISCOURSE_SMTP_PASSWORD: [redacted] DISCOURSE_SMTP_DOMAIN: [redacted] DISCOURSE_NOTIFICATION_EMAIL: [redacted] ## If you added the Lets Encrypt template, uncomment below to get a free SSL certificate LETSENCRYPT_ACCOUNT_EMAIL: [redacted] ## The maxmind geolocation IP account ID and license key for IP address lookups ## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/-/173941 for details DISCOURSE_MAXMIND_ACCOUNT_ID: [redacted] DISCOURSE_MAXMIND_LICENSE_KEY: [redacted] ## S3 backup crap ## Added by Lee on 2025/7/20 DISCOURSE_USE_S3: true DISCOURSE_S3_REGION: [redacted] DISCOURSE_S3_USE_IAM_PROFILE: true DISCOURSE_S3_BACKUP_BUCKET: [redacted] DISCOURSE_BACKUP_LOCATION: s3 ## Maybe fix sidekiq using too much memory errors? UNICORN_SIDEKIQ_MAX_RSS: 1024 ## Added by Lee on 2025/8/2 SIDEKIQ_CONCURRENCY: 6 RUBY_GC_HEAP_GROWTH_MAX_SLOTS: 40000 RUBY_GC_HEAP_GROWTH_FACTOR: 1.1 RUBY_GLOBAL_METHOD_CACHE_SIZE: 131072 MALLOC_ARENA_MAX: 2 ## The Docker container is stateless; all data is stored in /shared volumes: - volume: host: /var/discourse/shared/standalone guest: /shared - volume: host: /var/discourse/shared/standalone/log/var-log guest: /var/log ## Docker args? docker_args: "--add-host spacecityweather.com:[redacted] --add-host theeyewall.com:[redacted]" ## Plugins go here ## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/19157 for details hooks: after_code: - exec: cd: $home/plugins cmd: - git clone https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager.git ## Any custom commands to run after building run: - exec: echo "Beginning of custom commands" ## If you want to set the 'From' email address for your first registration, uncomment and change: ## After getting the first signup email, re-comment the line. It only needs to run once. #- exec: rails r "SiteSetting.notification_email='info@unconfigured.discourse.org'" - exec: echo "End of custom commands"

I’m using the standard single-container self hosted install, so it’s all set up however the defaults are set!

Question, even though I moved the /discourse folder over to a mountable volume, I still am struggling with docker. As containers and images are still being ran on the local drive instead of a volume. Any idea on how to fix this?

Moving discourse instance to a new server

Product Support Self-hosting

Headless (Headless) August 11, 2025, 8:50pm 5

And all the contents of the DB are stored in /var/discourse? So if I move all the contents of /var/discourse to a mountable volume, it should continue to use all the existing data?

Topic		Replies	Views
Simple summary of how to move Discourse to a larger disk Product Support	6	154	October 25, 2026
Change Discourse install storage location Self-Hosting how-to	0	4911	May 23, 2018
How to backup and restore a whole /var/discourse app folder? Self-hosting	17	6137	June 19, 2020
Move your Discourse Instance to a Different Server Self-Hosting migrations , how-to	11	294392	August 11, 2026
Migrate Existing Community to a Docker based Discourse Self-hosting	2	1309	October 10, 2021

Moving discourse instance to a new server

Related topics