The discussion revolves around finding the easiest way to export a single topic from one Discourse instance to another. orangeandblack5 is looking for a solution that is quick and painless, as the admins of the original instance are willing to support the move but do not want to invest a lot of time.
They considered two options: the topic and category export/import tool and pfaffman’s Discourse Downloader. However, the admins rejected both solutions, citing too much work.
RGJ suggested that pfaffman’s Discourse Downloader might not require admin permissions, and pfaffman confirmed that it can work without an API key for public topics. He also pushed a fix to make it easier to use.
pfaffman noted that his tool is not designed to move topics to another Discourse instance, but it can download the topic to a text file. orangeandblack5 is considering using the tool despite its limitations.
We are trying to export a single topic from one Discourse instance to either local storage or preferably another instance. The admins on the original instance support the move, but do not necessarily want to spend a lot of time working on making the move, and so we are looking for whatever solutions are available that are relatively quick and painless.
Thus far, we are considering two options:
While the first link is certainly the most direct way to achieve our end goal, we are not sure our admins will be on board with having to do what seems like a sizable chunk of work on their end to support the move, and so are also considering @pfaffman’s Discourse Downloader.
However, if one of these options is clearly better given our needs and constraints, we’d really appreciate some insight from others who have done one or the other, or are more familiar with the process than we are. Plus, if there’s any other option we haven’t found that would be better, we would really love to mnow!
Wow! It does look like I wrote it such that it won’t require an API key if it’s a public topic.
Or maybe not?
I pushed a fix, so you can do a git pull and it should work now with an empty apikeys file. (I think you need to create an empty one, though). It will download a topic to a text file.
I wrote it for off-line analysis of discussions, however, so I’m not sure how useful it’ll be without some work. I think that it should let you download the stuff locally, but won’t be much help (as it is) to move it to another Discourse.
If you want it moved to another Discourse and it’s a public topic, you’ll need to, say, get this tool to something different. If you have a budget you can contact me or post in Marketplace.
To be honest if I was going to spend that much time I’d probably just write something that crawls the topic and manually grabs all of the individual .json files lol
Unfortunately I’m not really able to give the resources to either of those options, so running the downloader may just be the best option I have.
