Here are the quick steps I took when I first ran the importer when it was under development. I can also attest to it working wonderfully.
- Setup a dev environment of Discourse per Beginners Guide to Install Discourse on Ubuntu for Development
- Stopped redis
- Copied the dump.rdb file from NodeBB and overwrote the redis dump file that exists
- Copied the uploads directory from NodeBB to the dev box
- Edited the nodebb.rb file to point to the copied uploads directory
- Ran the importer
bundle exec ruby script/import_scripts/nodebb/nodebb.rb
I do recommend taking a look at Preparing for and undertaking a platform migration, it has some great steps for validation and planning a migration.