Links broken after move

[Mark_Schmucker (mark78)]

Many of our intra-forum links are broken after moving to a new server. I had created the new server at a temporary url staging.example.com to help with the transition, but now that the transition is complete, many links at forum.example.com still point to staging.example.com (which no longer exists).

I have verified the app.yml and rebuilt:

containers/app.yml: DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME: forum.example.com

I have searched admin > settings for any vestiges of “staging”.

DNS has long since propagated.

I see this old reference, not sure if that’s related.

If no fix is possible except manual editing, any hints how to find all occurrences? The search button doesn’t work well for this.

[Remah (Just another happy Discourse user)]

Change the domain name or rename my Discourse?

This guide is for self-hosted Discourse instances that were installed using our installation guide on GitHub. If you are hosted by Discourse, please see Configure your domain name for hosted Discourse for specific instructions. You may eventually want to change the domain name of your Discourse instance, from say =BEFORE= → =AFTER= Let’s get started. Set the TTL for your DNS low, and in advance You need to let everyone know that the domain is about to change, so change the TTL f…

[Mark_Schmucker (mark78)]

I did that. All worked great except now I have broken links.

[Remah (Just another happy Discourse user)]

So you’re saying the remap and/or rebake failed?

@codinghorror

Replace all instances of the old name with the new name in posts

All the existing posts will still refer to the old domain. Let’s fix that:

./launcher enter app
discourse remap talk.foo.com talk.bar.com
rake posts:rebake

This remaps text in posts from the old URL to the new URL, then regenerates all posts just in case.

[Mark_Schmucker (mark78)]

Sorry, I did not do a remap. I’ll try that tonight.

[Mark_Schmucker (mark78)]

@Remah

So you’re saying the remap and/or rebake failed?

Yes, now I can say the remap failed.

> /var/www/discourse# discourse remap staging.example.com forum.example.com
> Rewriting all occurences of staging.example.com to forum.example.com
> THIS TASK WILL REWRITE DATA, ARE YOU SURE (type YES)
> YES
> Error: ERROR:  duplicate key value violates unique constraint "unique_post_links"
> DETAIL:  Key (topic_id, post_id, url)=(8718, 57455, https://forum.example.com/t/exampletopic/4606/336) already exists.
> The remap has only been partially applied due to the error above. Please re-run the script again.

I re-ran it as instructed and got the same error, on the same (topic_id, post_id, url) key.

I can get to the rails console and run some SQL/ActiveRecord if you can tell me what to run. Or Data Explorer.

[Remah (Just another happy Discourse user)]

Someone else will have to help you with this because I’m not sure why you would have duplicate key value.

[Mark_Schmucker (mark78)]

Ironically, the offending topic 8718 and post 57455 is in a PM between two users lamenting that the links are broken!

But using data explorer, I see only one post with id 57455. I don’t know why remap is complaining.

[michaeld (Michael - Communiteq)]

The post probably contains both the old and new URL already. Just edit it and remove them.

[Mark_Schmucker (mark78)]

I cleaned up a few posts and was able to complete the remap. However the rebake ran to 30% then encountered errors and hung the system and I had to reboot. System has adequate memory and disk space.

Question: After reboot, in ‘top’, there is a ruby process using 60% CPU. Is that the rake job? Would it resume after reboot?

[michaeld (Michael - Communiteq)]

It’s probably Sidekiq busy on rebakes. Go to /sidekiq on your forum to check.