I’ve been tasked at work with updating a Discourse instance we have that has been sitting at version 1.0.1 since…well…whenever v1.0.1 was released. Side note: It’s so strange to see how Discourse used to look… Anyway, over the next few days, I’m going to be working to get it up to date. I’m assuming I’ll need to use the console to rebuild, not Docker Manager, but other than that anything I should be looking out for? I only started working with Discourse at 1.5, so I won’t have read anything about Discourse prior to that.

Don’t necessarily migrate to the new instance; create a temporary instance, restore onto it, check it all works OK, then create a new container in the original location, shut down the old one, and restore the upgraded backup. Not that that should be any different, functionally, to doing an in-place upgrade, but at least you won’t blow up the live site if things don’t go according to plan (which, given how old that instance is, I wouldn’t rule out).

Never had to maintain anything that old…I’ve only been maintaining discourse for maybe the past ~year and a half. Should be as easy as just rebuilding, no?

[image] robbyoconnor: Should be as easy as just rebuilding, no? That’s my assumption…figured I’d double check before breaking a production site.

Jusrt to be safe – make a backup copy of the directory – then just cowboy it.

I’d be inclined to make a new instance and try to restore a backup.

[image] pfaffman: I’d be inclined to make a new instance and try to restore a backup. This is actually the saner approach I didn’t think of…

[image] pfaffman: I’d be inclined to make a new instance and try to restore a backup. :musical_note: I would if I could but I am not able :musical_note: Oops, sorry…broke out into song there. This instance is hosted locally, and not on DO where I can simply make a new droplet to play with. I can try to convince IT, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to. Lots of extra stuff, (like DNS), to deal with if I was to make a new instance.

Let me check that I am following…I should: Create a temporary DO droplet with an up-to-date copy of Discourse. Upload a Discourse backup of my out-of-date instance and restore it. Make sure the world doesn’t explode. Move the original /var/discourse somewhere else. Install Discourse locally again. Create backup on DO instance. Restore backup to new local instance?

Pretty much, although you don’t have to move all of /var/discourse out of the way, just shared/app (or whatever it’s called). Run a ./launcher bootstrap rather than a rebuild, because I think that does extra stuff to setup the shared directory again.

Perfect. Are you sure about the bootstrap step though, I thought rebuild runs bootstrap… launcher master usage () { echo "Usage: launcher COMMAND CONFIG [--skip-prereqs] [--docker-args STRING]" echo "Commands:" echo " start: Start/initialize a container" echo " stop: Stop a running container" echo " restart: Restart a container" echo " destroy: Stop and remove a container" echo " enter: Open a shell to run commands inside the container" echo " logs: View the Docker logs for a container" echo " bootstrap: Bootstrap a container for the config based on a template" echo " run: Run the given command with the config in the context of the last bootstrapped image" echo " rebuild: Rebuild a container (destroy old, bootstrap, start new)" echo " cleanup: Remove all containers that have stopped for > 24 hours" echo " start-cmd: Generate docker command used to start container" echo echo "Options:" echo " --skip-prereqs Don't check launcher prerequisites" echo " --docker-args Extra arguments to pass when running docker" echo " --skip-mac-address Don't assign a mac address" echo " --run-image Override the image used for running the container" exit 1

Ah, yes. Rebuild does the nuking itself, too.

Updating Discourse from v1.0.1

Product Support

jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld) June 6, 2017, 3:00am 15

Yeah - I’ve got a workstation I use for my personal Discourse production staging. I’m going to back it up, wipe it, and use it for this.

Topic		Replies	Views
What to Expect When Rebuilding Discourse Self-hosting	10	504	November 5, 2025
Manually create and restore Discourse backups Sysadmins how-to	13	16688	June 16, 2022
How to backup Discourse + Database from Console? Product Support	2	1062	April 8, 2019
Move Discourse to a new server without setting up the web UI first? Self-hosting	11	3136	September 3, 2022
How to upgrade if `/var/discourse` has only `shared` and is not git repo Product Support	12	1697	July 24, 2020

Updating Discourse from v1.0.1

Related topics