Migration scenarios, when installing on an existing community/ domain.?

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AI-generated summary

Queth is planning to migrate three instances of PHPBB 2 (French, Dutch, English) to a single instance of Discourse, serving all languages on the same domain. The current setup includes 30,000 users, 800mb databases, and static HTML content hosted on a VPS with Apache.

itsbhanusharma and Cameron_D suggest that importing multiple databases into one forum is possible, but requires modifications to the importer script to handle unique IDs and users. pfaffman, who specializes in imports, confirms this and adds that setting the language user setting during import is feasible.

Regarding keeping the same domain, itsbhanusharma proposes configuring Discourse on a separate subdomain, testing, and then moving to the preferred domain. pfaffman suggests using Apache reverse proxying to host multiple Discourse instances on the same server.

Queth is concerned about hosting Discourse on their VPS with Apache, but pfaffman provides a link to a guide on setting up Discourse on a server with existing Apache sites. pfaffman also recommends using a separate server for testing and production instances, but notes that it’s possible to host multiple instances on the same server using Apache reverse proxying.

1

hello,

I have fallen in love with discourse as my new community solution.

Before installing, and getting ahead of myself, I need to know what is possible concerning migration.

current situation:

I have an existing community, i have a 3 instances of PHPBB 2 (french, dutch, english users). 3 databases, biggest is 800mb. 30k users.

current forum is set up under forum.mysite.com and mysite.com/forum

my site also has some static HTML content.

hosted on VPS (apache, cpanel and such)

to be situation:

  • 1 instance of discourse serving all languages. all current language forums imported in discourse in separate archives.

  • keeping the same domain.

How can I do this with as little downtime as possible and keeping the same URL for the forum? Is it possible to import 3 databases into 1 forum?

what are possible scenarios?

I will host discourse myself as I have no budget for the hosted version. and that means i will probably need to move to digitalocean as well?

basically i need to know what the smartest way is to approach this.

thank you in advance for any help !

2

I’ve never seen multilingual forums but there is no reason for it not to work albeit the core language can be only one for the menus/buttons etc.

Totally possible in multiple ways:

  1. Configure on a separate subdomain and import everything there, test it then if all is good, move to the preferred (sub)domain.

  2. Dump all data from existing forum(s), set up your discourse at your subdomain of choice and import the data using the existing importers.

There are problems though. I have not done an import myself and have no idea as to how they handle redundancies in terms of users, content and media.

Only someone from team can answer that.

Any ideas @pfaffman??

Not really, You are good to go with any hosting provider as long as they offer you relatively modern specs and root access.

I don’t know about how to merge 3 forums together but for all the other questions, I’ve tried to answer to the best of my knowledge.

3

It should be with some changes to the importer script so it can differentiate between the different forums, otherwise when you start the second import all the posts from topic ID X will end up in the topic with the same ID from the first one imported.

There is an option somewhere that will set the interface language to whatever the user’s browser locale is set to, which would probably be useful in this scenario.

4

Well, I’m not team, but I do make much of my living from imports. :wink:

As @Cameron_D said, yes, you can import multiple databases to a single import. You need to do some work to see that each forum has unique user/post/etc IDs and some additional work if there are any users that are members of multiple fora.

5

I remember that is still in beta and highly unreliable that’s why I’m a bit shy to recommend it.
There is one thing though! Can the locale for all the users in an import be set or is it just a discourse thing?

6

Since each database is a single language it shouldn’t be difficult to add the language user setting to the import.

7

thank you for all the help and explanation regarding the languages!

i am still hesitant about keeping the same domain.

lets say i want 2 instances of discourse, one to test, and one for production. that way i can keep a testing board next to the live board.

how would I go setting up that? is that possible?

edit: also, my VPS has apache, is it still possible to get discourse on that?
edit 2: with searching found that it should be possible, however still my question stands about 2 discourse instances

thank you once again!

8

It’s easiest to just set up another server, but you could use the same principle in the above link to have multiple Discourse instances on a single server with Apache reverse proxying both.