Moving the server

Product Support Self-hosting

AI-generated summary

Gregory_Edigarov is migrating their Discourse server and encountered a “five blinking dots” error after restoring a backup and rebuilding the app. The rebuild completed without errors, and Discourse Doctor found no issues. jericson suggested trying Safe Mode, while pfaffman suspected a broken theme or CDN configuration, recommending checking the JavaScript console. Gregory_Edigarov confirmed the site starts fine when unofficial plugins are disabled. pfaffman advised removing plugins not from github/discourse/ in app.yml and rebuilding. JammyDodger offered to help identify problematic plugins if shared. The root cause appears to be an incompatible or broken unofficial plugin.

1

Hello, everybody

I am in the process of moving our discourse server to a new location.

On old server I did:
discourse backup
then copied the latest backup file from container to host system
copied it to new server

then on new server:
started the discourse container
copied backup file into it
did discourse restore (went fine)

Then I possibly made a mistake, I’ve tried to restart discourse container using docker restart, without rebuilding it.
when I opened it in browser, it was just showing me five blinking dots.

I tried rebuild the app, using ‘launcher rebuild app’ command. same five blinking dots.

what am I missing?
thanks a lot in advance.

2

Did the rebuild finish successfully? Is the container running?

You might try running Discourse Doctor:

sudo -s
/var/discourse/
./discourse-doctor

That should give more information that could help.

3

The rebuild passes just fine. And no problem is found by discourse-doctor.

4

What happens when you try Safe Mode?

5

Was this using the standard install or some other method? Did you happen to look at the site before restoring the backup?

6

Look at the javascript console. It’s probably a broken theme, but could be a broken CDN configuration if you have a CDN (or S3). If you don’t have CDN, then safe mode will probably fix it; then you can find the theme (or perhaps plugin) that’s the issue.

7

starts just fine if I disable unofficial plugins.

no_unofficial_plugins

how can I take a list of plugins installed?

8

Mostly, remove the ones that don’t come from github/discourse/ in your app.yml and then rebuild.

9

Though if you share a list of your plugins here we may be able to spot one with a known issue, which may save you some time. :+1: