I'm writing a short documentation for admins of Discourse forums I've helped set up. Do I miss something in it?

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

I’ve set up Discourse forums for several friends/associations. I’d like them to be more autonomous when administering, so I’ll be less likely to intervene myself.

They have been using Discourse as users and co-admins for months or years. They are not “new admins”, but they lack in-depth knowledge on how to maintain Discourse on a daily basis (outside moderation basics) and what should be known, as an admin, and in case of technical troubles, because I was always here to take care of such things.

I’ll still be available in the future, but the goal is to allow them track and address the most common issues by themselves.

Here’s what I wrote so far (IA-translated to English because my text will be written in French, so don’t pay attention if some sentences are weirdly written):

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Updates

Via the web interface

Run updates when there is an unhappy red smiley in the admin panel (it means there is an important update to apply).
Updates are done via:
https://tonforum.fr/admin/upgrade

They are sometimes done in two steps: you must first update “Docker_Manager” before you can upgrade the rest:

Via the command line

Sometimes, an update must be done via the command line (the Discourse admin page will explicitly say so if needed).

1. Connect to the server via SSH
2. Rebuild the forum (a rebuild always updates Discourse) using the following command:

3. /var/discourse/launcher rebuild app
   

4. From time to time, once you have confirmed that the forum is working correctly, it can be useful to remove unused Docker images (leftovers from previous upgrades) to free up disk space:

   /var/discourse/launcher cleanup
   

Location of important files on the server

app.yml

Contains the server configuration and the list of installed plugins. Very useful if you need to migrate the forum to another server or apply certain configurations (for example, moving uploads and backups to another disk). It is located here:

/var/discourse/containers/app.yml

mail-receiver.yml

Contains the configuration for the software that allows receiving replies by email and publishing them on the forum. It is located here:

/var/discourse/containers/mail-receiver.yml

Backups

Backup files are stored here:

/var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups/default

Important pages in the forum admin

Some pages that can be useful

Themes and components

They include custom CSS and HTML:

https://tonforum.fr/admin/config/customize/themes

Logs

Email

Useful for debugging:

https://tonforum.fr/admin/email-logs

Staff actions

Very useful. It keeps a record of (almost) all site setting changes and other actions performed by moderators and admins.

https://tonforum.fr/admin/logs/staff_action_logs

Error logs

Can provide clues when a problem is not obvious:

https://tonforum.fr/logs/

Backups

To change the backup frequency and maximum number of backups, view them, or download them:

https://tonforum.fr/admin/backups

Resources

https://meta.discourse.org
Official support. Do not hesitate to post there; community members and developers are usually very helpful.

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Do you see some things that could be added/removed? I think I can remove the /logs/ part, as it is very, very rarely useful. I’m not even sure I found useful information in it in many years of administering a few instances.

[Ed_S]

A couple of things I’d want to make clear.

One is, at the point of trying an update by web interface, be aware that the update may fail, and your forum may be down. Be prepared.

Another is, if your host becomes inaccessible or corrupted, you will need the backup files and the yml files. You will need to have them already somewhere safe on a separate system.

To combine the two: always take a backup, and download the backup, before trying an update.

[Heliosurge (Dan DeMontmorency)]

Hi Ed very valid points. A member awhile back did create a script for backing up to another system as I recall. Will need to do a search and check

Here is quite if the Op post. Canapin has a good reply with a link to backing up to Google drive)Dropbox as well

@Lhc_fl

Recently, a friend of mine encountered the problem of the VPS provider suddenly going out of business without notice. Unfortunately, for the sake of cheap, she chose a niche provider - one that didn’t even offer any data downloads. What’s worse is that she doesn’t even have the habit of downloading backups regularly. Overnight, her site disappeared, along with all the data on it.

Shocked by this, I wrote a Powershell script that will automatically download backups from your server to your local computer regularly without having to purchase any additional object storage services or spend a penny on other things. All you need is a Windows computer that you use regularly (and has plenty of hard drive space) and is connected to the Internet.

The script will automatically clean up backups from 5 days ago. You can set the automatic backup interval and the oldest backup time saved locally according to your needs.

$ssh_port = 22
$ssh_address = "username@your.site"


Write-Output "Starting Discourse backup download task..."
Write-Output '------------------------'
Write-Output "Fetching the latest backup file..."
Write-Output ''

while ($true) {

    $filename = ''

    while ($true) {
        try {
            Write-Output "> ssh -p $ssh_port $ssh_address 'cd /var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups/default/ && ls -t | head -n 1'"
            Write-Output ''
            $filename = ssh -p $ssh_port "$ssh_address" 'cd /var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups/default/ && ls -t | head -n 1'
            break
        }
        catch {
            $filename = ''
    
            Write-Output "Failed to fetch... Here is the log:"
            Write-Output '-------------'
            Write-Output $_
            
            $answer = Read-Host "Do you want to re-fetch? (y/N)"
            if ($answer -ne 'y') {
                break
            }
            Write-Output ''
        }
    }
    
    
    if ([String]::IsNullOrEmpty($filename)) {
        Write-Output "Error: Failed to fetch file name $filename"
        Write-Output ''
        $answer = Read-Host 'Retry?(y/N)'
  
        if ($answer -eq 'y') {
  
        }
        else {
      
            exit 1
        }
  
    }
    else {

        Write-Output "Latest backup: $filename"
        Write-Output ''
        
        $need_download = $true
        if (Test-Path ".\backups\$filename") {
            $answer = Read-Host ".\backups\$filename already exists. Do you want to download it again?(y/N)"
            Write-Output ''
            if ($answer -ne 'y') {
                $need_download = $false
            }
        }
        if ($need_download) {
            Write-Output "Start downloading..."
            Write-Output ''
            
            while ($true) {
                try {
                    Write-Output "scp -p $ssh_port ${ssh_address}:/var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups/default/$filename .\backups\"
                    Write-Output ''

                    scp -p $ssh_port "${ssh_address}:/var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups/default/$filename" .\backups\
                    
                    Write-Output "Download completed"
                    Write-Output ''
                    
                    break
                }
                catch {

                    Write-Output "Download failed >_<... The following is the log:"
                    Write-Output ''

                    Write-Output $_
                    
                    $answer = Read-Host "Download again? (y/N)"
                    Write-Output ''
                    if ($answer -ne 'y') {
                        break
                    }
                }
            }

        }
  
        Write-Output "Start trying to clean old backup files..."
        Write-Output ''

        $count = 0
        $backupfiles = Get-ChildItem -Path .\backups\
  
        foreach ($file in $backupfiles) {
            if ($file.CreationTime -le (Get-Date).AddDays(-5)) {
                try {
                    Write-Output "Delete old backup file $file ..."
                    Write-Output ''
                    $file.Delete()
                    $count = $count + 1
                } catch {
                    Write-Output "An error occurred while deleting old backup file $file >_<"
                    Write-Output '-------------------'
                    Write-Output $_
                    Write-Output '-------------------'
                }
            }
        }

        if ($count -ge 0) {
            Write-Output "Cleaned $count old backup files"
            Write-Output ''
        }
        else {
            Write-Output 'No old backup files need to clean up'
            Write-Output ''
        }

        Pause
  
        exit 0
  
    }
  
  
}

Save the above script as scriptname.ps1 in the path where you wish to download the backup. Try “Run with Powershell”. If successful, then you can proceed to the next step.

To schedule a task

1. Search “Scheduled Tasks”.
2. Double-click Add Scheduled Task. The Scheduled Task Wizard appears.
3. Click Next, then click Browse. The Select Program to Schedule dialog appears.
4. Navigate to the script that you created click it, then Open. You are returned to the Scheduled Task Wizard.
5. Provide a name for the task, or keep the default, which is the filename, specify how often to run the script, then click Next.
6. Specify the starting time and date (if you specified Daily, Weekly, or Monthly, or etc.) and recurrence, then click Next. This item should match the automatic backup cycle of your discourse
7. Type the user name and password for the account that will run the script, then click Next.
8. If you want to configure advanced properties, select the check box, then click Finish.

@Canapin with the launcher rebuild app, doesn’t it need to be ran as

./launcher r build app

This is just how U have been used to running it from other doc’s here in the site. As I have learned though there is often many ways to di things. Lol

Nice write up handy