How to upgrade Discourse from 1.6.1 version to latest_release

On Discourse version 1.6.1 we have customised as per our requirement and added multiple models both on rails and javascript side and some customisations in Javascript libraries as well.

Now we are trying to integrate Babble chat plugin for which we are facing many issues like manually placing the missing JS files and updating relative path of libraries imported. So we are planning to upgrade the discourse version to latest with which we can easily integrate babble chat plugin. Below mentioned points are my concern.

- Easy way to integrate babble chat plugin with discourse 1.6.1.
- Upgrade discourse with out effecting the existing functionality(created by us).

Given that your customizations are plugins, I’d set up a test site, copy your data over, and run the upgrade and see what happens.

Our customisations are not plugins, we modified many js files and created new models.
Is there any command to run the upgrade for discourse?

Sure. Just do a git pull and merge.

I really hope you modified Discourse in some way other than modifying the Docker container directly. Assuming you have these modifications stored in source control, pull and merge is your best route. If you didn’t you’re going to be in a rough time trying to find your modifications, transfer them, and test them.

No, there is no command, you performed your customization in an unsupportable way. You are going to need a very skilled developer with lots of time to get you upgraded to latest, something I strongly recommend doing cause there are may public security vulnerabilities that have since been patched.

Lest it was unclear,

left out the very likely possibility that “and merge” will involve some weeks of programming.

Perhaps you can move your changes into plugins and revert to un-modified 1.6.1 code.

Wanted to chime in here with a personal anecdote: A few months ago I took over managing a Discourse forum where I work. The forum is used seasonally, for about 5 months, then not touched for 7. When I took over we were having all sorts of intermittent issues. After the forum went “partially down” 3 times in 4 days, it was decided that I’d work with our IT staff to figure out what was wrong. Almost 6 hours later, we found that a former dev modified Discourse files, set them to overwrite the existing Discoures files each update, and this was the cause of our issues. 4 days of nearly full-time work later, we’d managed to stop the files from being overwritten, develop a plugin, and get everything working again.


Why am I sharing this? I just want to emphasize that modifying Discourse is unsupported (read: not a plugin) ways is bad. While we only had a few files modified, it caused us major issues that fortunately were caught before our forums went live again for the season. Please take the time to un-modify your install, put the changes into a plugin, and only then attempt an update.

So is it safe to assume we can upgrade multiple versions at once? In other words, can we go straight from say v2.1 to v2.3?

Yes, it is generally safe to upgrade multiple major releases at once. Rails migrations handle that for you.

However, it is always a good idea to take a full backup before major changes like this, so you have the ability to restore to a known working state in the unlikely event something goes very wrong.

Ciao Joshua,

Mi trovo nella situazione entusiasmante di dover aggiornare dalla versione v2.1.0.beta2 +119 alla 2.4.0.beta4.

Naturalmente, sono un po’ nervoso, quindi mi chiedevo se potessi indicarmi come eseguire un backup completo.

Stiamo eseguendo tutto in un contenitore Docker. Effettuiamo anche backup quotidiani dal pannello di amministrazione, ma se provo ad aggiornare con ./launcher rebuild app e qualcosa va storto, come posso tornare alla versione precedente (funzionante)? Da quanto riesco a capire, i backup contengono semplicemente il SQL per il database Postgres. Tutte le immagini sono archiviate altrove su S3.

Se puoi fornirmi qualche indicazione, ne sarei davvero grato.

Grazie,
Steve

Ciao Stephen,

SÏ, dovrebbe funzionare senza problemi. È altamente improbabile che una ricompilazione fallisca e, se ciò accadesse, nulla si romperebbe. Il tuo sito sarà offline, ma i dati sono al sicuro in un archivio persistente (non in un contenitore Docker).

Fare un backup è un’ottima idea (fai sempre un backup) e sì, i tuoi file caricati non vengono scaricati nel backup. Il tuo database fa riferimento ai file caricati su S3 e continuerà a farlo sia nel backup che in caso di ripristino. Di conseguenza, non è necessario scaricarli, sono già al sicuro su S3.

Se qualcosa va storto durante la ricompilazione, pubblica qui l’output del log!