Migrate a phpBB3 forum to Discourse

I put them in with no difference.

Not sure if these are errors from being pasted or if that’s how it actually is in your yml file, but those would cause issues. (Line breaks near the end of some comments, causing a second, un-commented, line to exist)

Your list items aren’t indented correctly.

The above should be

  new_categories: 
    - forum_id: general
      name: General

I recommend using https://www.yamllint.com/ to validate your config file.

Thank you for all of your replies. I quickly figured out that editing settings.yml outside of the import container, didn’t effect what was running. I also figured out about the yml whitespace, and corrected my settings file. Anyhow, the import of the phpBB forum went well, except…

My username on the phpBB was the same as my admin account on Discourse. I can’t log in, and there’s a message that:

All outgoing email has been globally disabled by an administrator. No email notifications of any kind will be sent.

As a result, I can’t get a reset password email sent. Is this a database setting? And if so, can I update that field using the limited resources of the container? Any other ideas?

Note that I have the migratepassword plugin installed, but that doesn’t seem to work (perhaps because my password was less than 15 characters)

You can enable emails for admin users from the rails console:

./launcher enter import
rails c
> SiteSetting.disable_emails = "non-staff"

You can also reset your password directly from the container, no need to use emails, by running:

./launcher enter import
rake admin:create

May I suggest a few changes to this documentation (and code):

• This is no longer needed as the disable_edit_notifications setting doesn’t exist anymore. disable system edit notifications does the mentioned job and is enabled by default.

• The two SSL lines are no longer commented by default in app.yml, so removing these two # will make the excerpt more accurate to what it should look like.

• This template should be updated so users don’t experience this error when importing.

• Also this (unless I did a mistake somewhere, it’s also something that should be fixed):
  Running IMPORT=1 bundle install returned:

  [!] There was an error parsing `Gemfile`: You cannot specify the same gem twice with different version requirements.
  You specified: sqlite3 (~> 1.3, >= 1.3.13) and sqlite3 (>= 0). Bundler cannot continue.
  
   #  from /home/root/discourse/Gemfile:249
   #  -------------------------------------------
   #  group :generic_import, optional: true do
   >    gem "sqlite3"
   #    gem "redcarpet"
   #  -------------------------------------------
  

  Indeed, sqlite3 is already specified a few lines above:

    # NOTE: in import mode the version of sqlite can matter a lot, so we stick it to a specific one
    gem "sqlite3", "~> 1.3", ">= 1.3.13"
    gem "ruby-bbcode-to-md", git: "https://github.com/nlalonde/ruby-bbcode-to-md"
    gem "reverse_markdown"
    gem "tiny_tds"
    gem "csv"
  end
  
  group :generic_import, optional: true do
    gem "sqlite3"
    gem "redcarpet"
  end
  

I used a dev install for my import, if it matters.

That information should be mentioned in the instructions or the template should be updated. This took me some hours…

What does it need to say?

Deleting this line made the successful construction of the container possible.

So you removed this line?

Yes, that was the solution.

“Hi, I have successfully migrated my phpBB forum to Discourse, everything went smoothly, and the forum is running great. Now I’ve realized that I didn’t enable binary mode during the FTP download of the phpBB data, which means all the images are corrupted. I’ve run the script again, but the images aren’t being overwritten. Which script, preferably with the path, do I need to modify so that the corrupted images and attachments are overwritten?”

In your second trial, Discourse is skipping the uploads because they already exist in the uploads table. Discourse avoids overwriting existing uploads unless explicitly instructed.

You can try adding the below code snippet in attachment_importer.rb (discourse/script/import_scripts/phpbb3/importers/attachment_importer.rb at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub) before calling @uploader.create_upload will ensure that any existing upload with the same filename is deleted first , forcing Discourse to re-upload it.

existing_upload = Upload.find_by(original_filename: filename)
if existing_upload
  existing_upload.destroy
  puts "Deleted existing upload: #{filename}"
end

upload = @uploader.create_upload(user_id, path, filename)

“Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, the change didn’t have any effect. The script runs through in just one minute, but the attachments are not being overwritten…”

You’ll probably need to wipe the database and run it again.

How do I do that?

Step 1: Connect to the server via SSH:

ssh username@server-address

Step 2: Access the application container:

./launcher enter import

Tip: Run docker ps to find the container name. By default, it is usually named app.

Step 3: Reset the database:

RAILS_ENV=production rake db:reset

Hey Canapin,

I’ve updated this part in the guide.

It depends. It’s still commented out when setting up the container for localhost. The guide assumes that a separate container is used for imports, which isn’t accessible over the internet, so obtaining certificates isn’t necessary in this case.

A PR for this has now been merged into core.

We are working on a fix for this, but I’ve updated the guide and added an FAQ on how to resolve this issue.