# Migrate an SMF2 forum to Discourse

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-an-smf2-forum-to-discourse/90314>\
**Category:** Sysadmins\
**Tags:** how-to\
**Created:** [June 20, 2018, 2:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-an-smf2-forum-to-discourse/90314 "2018-06-20T14:26:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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**Author:** ![miligraf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/miligraf/32/119741_2.png) [@miligraf](https://meta.discourse.org/u/miligraf)\
**Post date:** [July 19, 2018, 3:38pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-an-smf2-forum-to-discourse/90314/2 "2018-07-19T15:38:00Z")

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Great guide! It really helped me migrate a large SMF2 forum to Discourse and I’m loving it.

Just two notes:

- The host’s smf2 path might be different. In my case it was **/home/ubuntu/smf2** (EC2 instance running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS image).
- After the import is finished, the user needs to destroy the **import** container because if not, that’s the one that will run on server boot (instead of the **app** container).

Tips:

- Run the import using a large EC2 instance (c5.2xlarge) and then downgrade to a smaller type (t2.medium) - for me it took about 1.5 hours to import a forum with 28k messages and 10GB of attachments!
- If you’re planning on using S3 for uploads - then set it up before running the import!

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-an-smf2-forum-to-discourse/90314)._