Migrating legacy data from other applications

[lxsameer]

Hi. I have a dump from an old forum application which I like to migrate to discourse. What is the best way to do it ? should I create a plugin for it ? Or use the API to create new posts ? I need the date to be exactly the same as the dump file for each post.

[Dax]

What better chance to take a look at our import scripts from other platforms?

discourse/discourse

[lxsameer]

hell yeah. How can I use them ?

[Dax]

You can start reading this guide:

Migrating to Discourse from another Forum software

So you want to migrate your existing forum to Discourse? That’s great! Let’s get started! We recommend setting up a development environment on your machine (or inside a virtual machine) and run the import there instead of inside the docker container. Then you will be able to create a backup and import it on your production instance. Refer the OS X or Ubuntu installation guide for development. We highly recommend to read the script before performing import, as the script is meant for developers…

[lxsameer]

thanks a lot friend.

[pfaffman]

You don’t mention what software you’ve been using. Every importer migrates the original date of the posts, so that part is easy.

Searching “your forum #howto” will find instructions if there are any, and the link above will get you to all of the importers.

A substantial part of my living is from doing imports. I have an info page here: Discourse Migration – Literate Computing