Is there any way to restore your site from backup in the terminal?

Support
1

I did a backup of my site before I upgraded to the latest version of the discourse however I can’t even access my site any more even though the upgrade appears to be successful as no error is displayed. Is there anyway that I can restore my site from the backup that I created earlier from terminal app as I can’t access the site?

  1. Is it possible?

  2. If yes, where do discourse save or store the backups that I executed from the admin panel?

  3. Is there any guide on how to restore the site from backup?

Thanks

2 Likes
2

Yes.

They’re stored in public/backups/default/.

Just run the following command (in the discourse directory)

script/discourse restore <filename.of.the.backup.tar.gz>
19 Likes
3

Thank you. :slight_smile:

7

This seems like a handy thing to be able to do since if you screw up configuring SSO you can’t get back into your site. I spent a week one day trying to get SSO configured, and now that it is configured correctly it seems that my account on the SSO (which I don’t control) is gone, so I can’t get in.

So, script/discourse restore fails because thor isn’t installed.

gem install thor fixes that, but then I’m still denied because:

URGENT: FATAL:  Peer authentication failed for user "discourse"

Solving my immediate problem, I suppose I could turn off SSO from the Rails console. . .

edit: to disable SSO from the rails console:

cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails c
SiteSetting.enable_sso=false
exit
exit
2 Likes
8

There’s a way to log in: Visit /users/admin-login, which can be used to log in via email :slight_smile:

6 Likes
9

It worked for me by first getting into the app

./launcher enter app

then

discourse enable_restore
discourse restore <filename.of.the.backup.tar.gz>
discourse disable_restore

Using the script/discourse didn’t work

17 Likes
10

restoring from a app.yml and an external tar.gz file was mixing up some of the items I found along this thread:

TARBALL_PATH=$(ls local/backups/-*.tar.gz | tail -n 1)
TARBALL_NAME=$(basename ${TARBALL_PATH})
cat ${TARBALL_PATH} | docker exec -i app sh -c "cat - > /var/www/discourse/public/backups/default/${TARBALL_NAME}"
docker exec -i app sh -x << EOF
discourse enable_restore
discourse restore ${TARBALL_NAME}
discourse disable_restore
EOF

I had several pitfalls:

  1. the tarball to restore has to be placed exactly in /var/www/discourse/public/backups/default/
  2. the /var/www/discourse/script/discourse restore tarball-name did not work due to some single sign-on known issue
  3. the version of thor installed by gem install thor was too recent and then incompatible with the rest.
  4. finally one of the tarball I tried to restore from did not contain the “meta.json” file…

Hope this helps other in their restore journey.

2 Likes
11

Rather than try to restore from app.yml it’s much easier to just ./launcher enter app and restore it from the command line.

3 Likes
12

The goal was to automate it without any entering container with the launcher.
Imagine your instance got lost for any reason. The only files you stored in git was your containers/app.yml and luckily you have a daily tarball backup.

3 Likes
13

You can also do it directly to Postgres:

dropdb dbname
createdb dbname
gunzip -c filename.gz | psql dbname
14

discourse is script/discourse – executed via bundle exec and with rails_env=production. Look at /usr/local/bin/discourse.

Running bundle exec script/discourse takes care of the thor mismatched gem version, too. Or just using the discourse convenience script.

3 Likes
15

I tried this, and for this line:

discourse restore <filename.of.the.backup.tar.gz>

I used:

discourse restore root@droplet-01:/test/MyBackup.tar.gz

I wasn’t sure if that was the correct way to access a file “outside the app from within the app”, but it seemed to find the backup file and start the restore. The restore finished with the ambiguous messages:

Finished!
[FAILED]
Restore done.

Tried to access my forum again, but it’s still not working, so I guess the restore didn’t work?

1 Like
16

You can’t. You need to copy the backup file into the correct directory. Please follow the instructions at Restore a backup from the command line if you want to restore from the command line.

3 Likes