Change the interface language for many users via a database query?

Support
1

I’m wondering if someone could help me with a support request please.

I need to update the preferences of all our users who currently have an interface language of English (US) and change them over to use English (UK) instead.

Is there a data explorer query I can craft to issue some kind of SQL UPDATE query with a where clause on it to catch only the English (US) ones?

For reference / insight… we’ve recently spent a lot of time updating all our Site texts on the English (UK) language and during testing we’ve found that anyone who signed up to our platform more than a year ago was defaulting to the old default site setting of English (US), rather than English (UK), approx 15k users need updating.

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2

You can’t run UPDATE queries via the Data Explorer plugin because it is strictly read-only.

For bulk updates like this, use the Rails console instead:

User.where(locale: 'en').update_all(locale: 'en_GB')

For more examples of updating user preferences in bulk, refer to:

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3

If I run this in Data Explorer:

SELECT
  u.locale,
  COUNT(*) AS user_count
FROM users u
WHERE u.active = TRUE
  AND u.locale IN ('en', 'en_GB')
GROUP BY u.locale
ORDER BY user_count DESC, u.locale

I get:

locale user_count
en_GB 19479
en 16014

I need to UPDATE the 16,014 en users to be en_GB.

And I’m not brave enough to run an update query on prod :blush:

4

Phew :sweat_smile:

Fantastic, thank you! :person_bowing:

5

Thanks @jahan_gagan

I took a DB backup first :sweat_smile:

I then ran this:

It worked perfectly:

Loading production environment (Rails 8.0.4)
discourse(prod)> User.where(locale: 'en').update_all(locale: 'en_GB')
=> 16016

And my Data Explorer query now responds with:

locale user_count
en_GB 35493

Thank you :clap:

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