Nasser, running a self-hosted Discourse site, lost access to the “Upgrade Discourse” button after a rebuild and encountered repeated admin access issues — receiving “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private” when clicking Admin or navigating to /admin/update. Initially, Bas suggested he might be on the latest version, but JammyDodger clarified the button should still appear. Nasser confirmed the Docker Manager plugin was present in app.yml, and logs showed no clear errors. Attempts to recreate admin privileges via rake admin:create temporarily restored access, but visiting /admin/update consistently broke admin access again, suggesting a possible plugin conflict or session issue. JammyDodger suspected the discourse-user-card-badges plugin, but even after removing all plugins except Docker Manager, the issue persisted. Double headers and site hangs appeared, prompting Nasser to consider a full reinstall. Finally, JammyDodger asked if Cloudflare was in use — it was — and linked to a fix for Cloudflare’s auto-minify feature breaking Discourse. Following those instructions resolved the issue entirely. Nasser thanked the community for saving him from a full server rebuild Nasser.
Hello,
I am running a self-hosted Discourse website and I always update the website by the “Upgrade Discourse” button on the admin area.
Today I was not able to enter the admin area and was getting this message, “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private”. I managed to fix the issue by rebuilding Discourse and now the interface is upgraded, but I can’t find “Upgrade Discourse” button.
Can anyone help me fix this issue?
Thank you
I think you are running the absolute latest version, so there’s nothing to upgrade to 
Thank you for your response.
So, If there are no updates, the button will not be visible ?
No, the ‘update’ tab should always be there even if there are no current updates to take advantage of. It comes from the docker manager plugin.
Can you access the page directly? [YourSite]/admin/update
Just to check, when you rebuilt your site, did you remove the docker manager plugin?
I just rebuild using the following SSH commands,
cd /var/discourse
sudo ./launcher rebuild app
That should open your app.yml for editing rather than tell you it’s not accessible. You may need to use sudo nano containers/app.yml
The plugin section is towards the bottom and looks a bit like this:
## 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
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-adplugin
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-akismet
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-assign
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-cakeday
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-calendar
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-category-experts
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-data-explorer
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-docs
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-encrypt
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-follow
Though if you haven’t opened that and edited any out docker manager should be included automatically.
Perhaps there’s more clues in your /logs?
Are you loggedin as admin?
Do you see the admin menu?
You can
cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rake admin:create
I see it but when I click it I get the following message, “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.”
I lost the Admin privileges again, I really don’t know what is going on?!
Ah, I have a hypothesis. Maybe navigating to the upgrade page un-admins you? I was about to ask if you could try it again. Could you do it another time to test it?
I’ve tried to repro this by rebuilding with the discourse-user-card-badges plugin as that’s the one that stood out from your list, and I’m seeing some unusual errors while navigating the site. It doesn’t seem to be exactly what you’re seeing, but you could try removing that plugin from your app.yml and rebuilding to see if that’s the root cause of your issue.
Thank you for your response.
It is the Admin button, and it’s working again before I break the site by navigating to /admin/update
Thanks, I am able to enter the admin area again. But discourse is broken after navigating to /admin/update
I tried to navigate to /admin/update, and it happened again I am no longer able to enter the admin area and also …
I am rebuilding discourse again now.
Linking these two issues, feels like they might be related:
