I’m planning to store data with a plugin, of literally 1 value, a topic id. What’s the best way to do this? Thanks.

If you only need to store a single Topic ID (like a configurable value), the simplest Discourse-native way is using a SiteSetting. You also get a built-in admin UI automatically. config/settings.yml: plugins: my_plugin_enabled: default: true client: false my_plugin_topic_id: defa…

I think PluginStore is the most suitable way. A site setting will not fit this use case. Thanks!

Your question reminded me of something I recently read on Meta. [image] How Discourse Uses Discourse “Are there any topics that talk about not using PluginStore anymore? Trying to figure out if I should use PluginStore or just make my own db table and columns in a plugin I’m working on,” the Dis…

What is the reason why you don’t want a site setting? It could be hidden so admins won’t see it, kind of like the IDs for the special topics in core, like TOS. config/site_settings.yml 908d590fe default: "summary" hidden: true client: …

My use case is this: any topic or post created from the time the plugin is enabled is synced and stored somewhere else. But topics before that aren’t, so I have to run a job to sync those, perhaps in batches of 100. I need to store the lowest topic I’d so the next batch is that minus 100, and so on. …

Chatbot does something very similar. Here is the migration: db/migrate/20240217010103_create_chatbot_post_embeddings_bookmark_table.rb main # frozen_string_literal: true class CreateChatbotPostEmbeddingsBookmarkTable < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0] def change create_tabl…

That’s good - at least I’m not the only one :laughing:… my next hurdle is how to run the migration - in a dev Discourse site or something else… wouldn’t running the migration then just add to Discourse’s migrations directory? Should I copy the file manually? Thanks.

You place it, as per all plugin migrations, in the plugin (just like Chatbot above). You run migrations with LOAD_PLUGINS=1 rake db:migrate Read up on migrations here: [image] Active Record Migrations — Ruby on Rails Guides Migrations are a feature of Active Record that allows you to …

I know, the only thing I don’t get is that I’m supposed to write the minute and second manually as I create the file?

What's the best way to store data with a plugin?

Development

NateDhaliwal (Nate Dhaliwal) November 19, 2025, 8:32am 5

I was just about to start - thanks for bringing this up. It seems like making a whole DB table for 1 value is overkill, and completely unnecessary. Any ideas?

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What's the best way to store data with a plugin?

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