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?
Is it possible?
If yes, where do discourse save or store the backups that I executed from the admin panel?
Is there any guide on how to restore the site from backup?
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
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.
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?
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.
Here is the working script I use to restore prod to dev and test:
#!/bin/sh
set +x
set -e
# This script restore the latest productive backup to the test/dev environment
CONTAINER_NAME=app-test
LATEST_BACKUP=$(mc ls s3/backup-prod/default | tail -n 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 5)
mc cp s3/backup-prod/default/${LATEST_BACKUP} /tmp
# ensure /var/www/discourse/public/backups/default/ exists with the proper ownership
docker exec -i ${CONTAINER_NAME} sh -c "mkdir -p /var/www/discourse/public/backups/default/ && chown -R discourse:www-data /var/www/discourse/public/backups/default/"
cat /tmp/${LATEST_BACKUP} | docker exec -i ${CONTAINER_NAME} sh -c "cat - > /var/www/discourse/public/backups/default/${LATEST_BACKUP}"
docker exec -i ${CONTAINER_NAME} sh -x << EOF
discourse enable_restore
rails runner "SiteSetting.set('backup_location', 'local')"
discourse restore ${LATEST_BACKUP}
discourse disable_restore
rm -f /var/www/discourse/public/backups/default/${LATEST_BACKUP}
EOF
# rebuild container
cd /var/lib/discourse/discourse_docker
stdbuf -oL -eL ./launcher rebuild ${CONTAINER_NAME} 2>&1 | sed 's/DISCOURSE_google_oauth2_client_secret=[^ ]*/DISCOURSE_google_oauth2_client_secret=***REDACTED***/g'
cd -
rm -f /tmp/${LATEST_BACKUP}
The rails runner "SiteSetting.set('backup_location', 'local')" was missing and preventing restore from the backup tarball.
Note that the output of the launcher script had to be redacted as it would disclose secrets in it’s output especially when done over a visible CI/CD job.
Glad you have a solution. Here are a couple things that will make it easier for someone else.
If you use DISCOURSE_ALLOW_RESTORE: 'true' in your app.yml, you can skip enabling restore. (You can similarly put your Google auth in ENV and keep them out of the database altogether.)
If you have both staging and production use the same S3 bucket, you can restore the latest backup with
If you need to read it locally, you could similarly override the sitesetting with an ENV and it would read the most recent backup from the local store.
