Let’s say I want to try a new version of Discourse. For safety reasons I would like to backup everything, so I can do a easy roll-back to the last version. I generally do a “git pull && ./launcher rebuild app” to get the new versions.I only run discourse at my docker installation.
Is it enough enough to stop discourse, tar everything from /var/discourse and /var/lib/docker? Is there a better solution, maybe with docker commands?
It is generally not possible to downgrade to older Discourse versions.
However taking a full backup before the upgrade should work.
The solution that I recommend now is to have a separate staging site that shares an S3 backup bucket with the main site. You also want to see that the staging site won’t send email; an easy solution is to configure it with bogus SMTP settings.
With this in place, you can easily restore the most recent live data to the staging site and run an upgrade there. If it works, you run the upgrade on the main site. If you’re paranoid, you see what commit the staging site is running and enter that as the version in your yml file.