After upgrading their Discourse instance, davidkingham found that Font Awesome icons—both Pro and non-Pro—stopped displaying. They shared screenshots and a video showing missing icons like fal-comment-pen, and noted that switching icon styles (e.g., Light/Classic, Regular/Classic) yielded inconsistent results. Initially suspecting configuration issues, they confirmed their web_only.yml was correct. After testing, they discovered that removing the Font Awesome Pro plugin restored non-Pro icons, indicating the issue was plugin-specific. Further testing revealed only Pro icons were affected. Attempting to rebuild with raise_on_fail: false removed caused a failure due to Git ownership issues, specifically: fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at '/var/www/discourse'. Following the error’s suggestion, davidkingham added git config --global --add safe.directory /var/www/discourse to their app.yml before running the plugin’s install script. This resolved the issue and restored Pro icons. pfaffman had earlier suggested possible name changes in Font Awesome, but davidkingham ruled this out since default icons were also missing. The root cause was Git’s security policy blocking the plugin’s install script, not icon name deprecation or configuration errors.
I upgraded my instance last night after putting it off for many months, and now almost all of my icons have stopped working, pro and non-pro. Below is a video of the category icon selector to demonstrate. You can see I previously had fal-comment-pen.
I also tried different combinations, with differing results:
I’ve double checked my web_only.yml configuration and everything looks good, including the key. But the issue seems to go beyond pro, so I’m not sure where to go from here, any suggestions?
At some point font awesome changed the names of a bunch of stuff. There were some things in place to map to the old names, but maybe those aws gone now?
Thanks Jay, I remember going through that process this summer, so I don’t think that’s it. Especially since many of the default icons are missing as well. For example:
I removed the raise_on_fail: false and then the rebuild failed with this:
I, [2026-01-04T17:38:39.450544 #1] INFO -- : > cd /var/www/discourse/plugins/discourse-fontawesome-pro && /var/www/discourse/plugins/discourse-fontawesome-pro/scripts/install.sh
fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at '/var/www/discourse'
To add an exception for this directory, call:
git config --global --add safe.directory /var/www/discourse
ERROR Error during pnpmfile execution. pnpmfile: "/var/www/discourse/.pnpmfile.cjs". Error: "Command failed: git clean -f -X app/assets/javascripts
fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at '/var/www/discourse'
To add an exception for this directory, call:
git config --global --add safe.directory /var/www/discourse
".
For help, run: pnpm help install
I, [2026-01-04T17:38:40.142946 #1] INFO -- : [.pnpmfile.cjs] Detected old app/assets/javascripts directory. Cleaning up gitignored files...
FAILED
--------------------
Pups::ExecError: cd /var/www/discourse/plugins/discourse-fontawesome-pro && /var/www/discourse/plugins/discourse-fontawesome-pro/scripts/install.sh failed with return #<Process::Status: pid 246 exit 1>
Location of failure: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/pups-1.3.0/lib/pups/exec_command.rb:131:in `spawn'
exec failed with the params {"cd"=>"$home/plugins/discourse-fontawesome-pro", "cmd"=>["$home/plugins/discourse-fontawesome-pro/scripts/install.sh"]}
bootstrap failed with exit code 1
** FAILED TO BOOTSTRAP ** please scroll up and look for earlier error messages, there may be more than one.
./discourse-doctor may help diagnose the problem.
be6b0968a3bab273e52bd1927a6c3dac611a9e6103c75fa7ce8ea9b85ea3e233
x86_64 arch detected.
755bbed4f3cf
Nothing to do, your container has already started!
