Let’s say I want to move my Discourse site from one Amazon EC2 instance (e.g. t2.micro) to a larger instance (e.g. t2.medium), what is the correct procedure for this?
The only option I know about is:
Backup the existing site
Install Discourse on the new server
Configure Discourse using temporary values
Restore the backup
However, I’m thinking that the smart people at Discourse thought about this situation and there’s a way to restore a backup on a new installation without step 3.
Scouring the site, I wasn’t able to find a definitive answer.
I did look at Move your Discourse Instance to a Different Server, but the instructions seem to imply that a generic installation is already active on the target server and that you can log in and immediately perform a restore.
@pfaffman thank you for helping with this question, there’s one spot where I’m still a bit unclear.
On the new server (assuming the prerequisites are already installed), after cloning the Discourse repository, do I still need to run discourse-setup? I don’t believe it’s possible to issue the commands
until after setup completes. Or am I incorrect? If I am correct, this is the part I’m referring to, you have to essentially provide a set of default values before you are able to perform a restore.
Yes, you still need to set up Discourse, but you can just use the same app.yml that you use on the old instance (or type them in to discourse-setup if that’s easier for you). But you have to have all of those values for a running Discourse anyway, so it’s not “temporary” values, but the values.
The command-line restore saves the you time of creating a temporary admin account that you’d use just to restore the backup.
when I use the command line, everything goes well during the restore but at the end I get the following error: Something went wrong while notifying user.
do you have any idea what I should do?
also is it possible to set up the new server by simply copying /var/discourse/ of the old server into the new one, rather than restoring a backup?