I got an email notification the other day that my self-hosted Discourse site (Ubuntu 18.04.6 on Contabo) was due an update, so to the Admin page I went to update. As usual, I first needed to update docker-manager, and then run the rest of the update for the site. That update seemed to freeze in place–it reached a certain point, and then didn’t move at all. After about an hour of that, I figured CLI intervention was called for, so I ssh’d into the server and did cd /var/discourse; git pull; ./launcher rebuild app. That completed without apparent error, but I’m left with a site that looks like this:
(the dots are animated in real life). Thinking that the software might just be taking some time to start up, I waited–over a day, in fact–with no change. Rebooting the server had no effect, nor did rebuilding again.
Interestingly, my users are still able to post by email, and the site sends those out as expected.
I’d appreciate some pointers here–what can I do to get the site back up?
If it works in safe mode then it could be a plugin, theme or theme component that’s causing some kind of conflict. You can use the options on the safe mode screen to help narrow it down.
Disabling just ‘unofficial plugins’ seems to work:
And I can see this error in the browser console when trying to load your site not in safe mode:
Uncaught (in promise) Error: Could not find module `admin/models/admin-user` imported from `discourse/plugins/discourse-merge-users/discourse/components/merge-users-form`
c loader.js:247
c loader.js:258
findDeps loader.js:168
c loader.js:262
requireModule loader.js:24
Ember 3
resolveOther resolver.js:241
Ember 5
initialize colocated-template-overrides.js:31
eachThemePluginTemplate colocated-template-overrides.js:41
initialize colocated-template-overrides.js:22
initialize app.js:41
runInstanceInitializers Ember
each dag-map.js:192
walk dag-map.js:121
each dag-map.js:66
topsort dag-map.js:72
Ember 4
invoke queue.ts:201
flush queue.ts:98
flush deferred-action-queues.ts:75
_end index.ts:616
_boundAutorunEnd index.ts:257
promise callback*n/< platform.ts:28
flush Ember
_scheduleAutorun index.ts:803
_ensureInstance index.ts:791
schedule index.ts:384
Ember 6
<anonymous> start-app.js:4
<anonymous> discourse-boot.js:18
<anonymous> discourse-boot.js:19
loader.js:247
Which is pointing to an issue with discourse-merge-users. You could try rebuilding without that plugin to see if that’s the problem.
Checking the plugin topic, it looks like it’s been deprecated and this is a known issue:
That does indeed seem to have been the problem; rebuilding without it does resolve it–though it’s interesting that the topic you shared indicates that the problem appears when someone is not an admin, and I am. But with it disabled, the site now seems to work fine again. Thanks for the quick and on-point help.