Disabling email on backup restore

Feature
1

It’s great that outgoing email gets suspended when a backup is restored, along with a suitable site notice to remind the admin to switch it on.

Should / could this be extended to override POP polling too, incase that was setup and starts consuming messages?

This would be helpful where the settings “pop3 polling enabled” and “pop3 polling delete from server” are both set.

4 Likes
2

Yes, I second that.

It would be great if there was a “don’t reach out to any external service” mode that disables all external actions that have a permanent effect on the world outside the forum, like outgoing emails (except for those that are really essential), POP3 delete from server and triggering webhooks.

5 Likes
3

Yep - a sort of ‘isolation mode’ so that you can do a test restore of a backup (as is good practice from time to time) without any worry of impacting the running instance, or during migration you can stand up the new instance and check it over safely before making the switch (presuming the source site is in read-only mode or down etc…).

2 Likes
4

Good point, any thoughts on this @gerhard?

2 Likes
5

I agree. An “isolation mode” would be a useful feature. Not just after restores.

For now, something similar could be done with a simple plugin. Something like the following should work:

# name: isolation-mode
# about: Enables isolation mode after restoring backup.
# version: 1.0

after_initialize do
  on(:site_settings_restored) do
    SiteSetting.pop3_polling_enabled = false
    WebHook.update_all(active: false)
  end
end

As an alternative, you could also use the discourse restore CLI command and update site settings and whatnot afterwards with the rails runner.

3 Likes
6

Is this still the best advice?

7

Yes, nothing changed. There is no “isolation mode” feature, so disabling more than outgoing email can’t be done on restore because there’s no way to notify admins about it and give them an easy option for turning everything back on.

1 Like
8

I’ve added this to my own repo (crediting @gerhard of course!).

Things I added:

  • disable emails: yes
  • login required: true

And voila, on completing a back-up restore:

image
image1110×515 29.5 KB

That really is a life-saver for hosting sensitive staging versions with real user emails …

Thanks again!

1 Like