Did I overwrite my site settings with a cross-instance backup/restore?

My company is evaluating Discourse and I have created two instances, A and B. I wanted to check out the backup/restore functionality as it might apply to different instances and restored a backup from instance A to instance B.

It appears that the data was successfully migrated from A to B, however it also appears that some site settings were overwritten. For example, instance B is now using SSO to sign in when that was not enabled on B before. The admin accounts were different between A and B, and I no longer appear to have access to my admin account on B.

I have tried u/admin-login with the original app.yml’s DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS value with no success (“Unknown email address” and eventually “You’ve performed this action too many times…”). I have been trying different things like launcher rebuild app, but I can’t seem to make any progress in getting to the admin panel of instance B.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! How can I get back into my admin account on instance B?

1 Like

SiteSettings are a part of a back-up, why wouldn’t they be? They contain critical info for running a specific site.

on the command line, within the container you can run:

rake admin:create to create a new admin user so you can get in.

2 Likes

All settings are replaced except those set in the yml file. See Configure an S3 compatible object storage provider for uploads f for an example of doing that. Also, that’s a convenient way to restore one backup to another server. There is also a topic about setting up a staging server with examples. Set up a staging server

1 Like