I'm writing a short documentation for admins of Discourse forums I've helped set up. Do I miss something in it?

General
8

Thank you for your help!

I’ve added this at the beginning of my guide:

Make sure you’re prepared for any situation

It is strongly recommended, in addition to local backups (saved on the same server as the forum), to have a copy of these backups on another server or in the cloud[1].

It is also useful to keep a copy of the file /var/discourse/containers/app.yml in a secure place[2]. This optional file is used in case of a forum reinstallation or a migration to another server.

If there is any serious doubt about anything, contact me (canapin@gmail.com).

Added this in the update section:

:information_source: Before doing an update, it is strongly recommended to download the latest backup of your forum.

Added this:

What to do if the forum no longer works?

Rebuilding the forum fixes many problems and is done with the same command as a command-line update:

/var/discourse/launcher rebuild app

What if the forum still doesn’t work after a rebuild?

Ask me (canapin@gmail.com) or post on the official support forum.

I also mentioned ask.discourse.org at the end of the guide.

Resources

https://meta.discourse.org : official support, don’t hesitate to post there — community members and devs are very helpful
https://ask.discourse.com : a chatbot trained on Discourse support and data, surprisingly effective for answering questions (yes, really)

Full text

Make sure you’re prepared for any situation

It is strongly recommended, in addition to local backups (saved on the same server as the forum), to have a copy of these backups on another server or in the cloud[1:1].

It is also useful to keep a copy of the file /var/discourse/containers/app.yml in a secure place[2:1]. This optional file is used in case of a forum reinstallation or a migration to another server.

If there is any serious doubt about anything, contact me (canapin@gmail.com).

Updates

:information_source: Before doing an update, it is strongly recommended to download the latest backup of your forum.

Via the interface

Do updates when there is an unhappy red smiley in the admin (it means there is an important update to do).
Updates are done via https://yourforum.com/admin/upgrade

They are sometimes done in two steps: you first need to update “Docker_Manager” before being able to upgrade the rest:

image
image1096×674 23.4 KB

Via the command line

Sometimes, an update must be done via the command line (the Discourse admin page will say so if needed).

  1. Connect to the server via SSH
  2. Rebuild the forum (a rebuild always updates Discourse) using the following command:
  3. /var/discourse/launcher rebuild app
  4. From time to time, after making sure the forum works correctly, it can be useful to remove unused Docker images (leftovers from previous upgrades) to free disk space:
    /var/discourse/launcher cleanup

What to do if the forum no longer works?

Rebuilding the forum fixes many problems and is done with the same command as a command-line update:

/var/discourse/launcher rebuild app

I think it’s quite good now and that I don’t miss anything important :slight_smile:

  1. If I installed your forum, your backups are automatically copied to my Google Drive, but ideally in the future they should be saved on a space you are responsible for. We’ll talk about it one day :smile: ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. It contains the mail server username and password as well as the top-level administrator email (mine, actually). ↩︎ ↩︎

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