I haven’t upgraded discourse in quite some time and tried to do so today. In my browser at admin/update I get the message that everything is up to date, but it is showing version v2.4.0.beta2 +17 and I understand that the latest version is 3.6.0.beta2.
So I tried updating via terminal using ./launcher rebuild app and the update failed, with the message UPGRADE OF POSTGRES FAILED. I read the support page and followed all instructions there and in similar posts about POSTGRES update issues, but haven’t been able to fix the issue.
I did look at the logs in /var/discourse/shared/standalone/log/var-log/postgres and found repeated error messages, such as this:
2025-11-19 21:42:13.815 GMT [242] LOG: skipping missing configuration file “/shared/postgres_data/postgresql.auto.conf”
2025-11-19 21:42:13.816 UTC [242] FATAL: data directory “/shared/postgres_data” has wrong ownership
2025-11-19 21:42:13.816 UTC [242] HINT: The server must be started by the user that owns the data directory.
One thing I don’t understand is that there is no directory /shared/postgres_data - but rather /shared/standalone/postgres_data.
The error message from terminal is included below. I’d be grateful for any pointers to get the update working.
Thanks,
Nick
Success. You can now start the database server using:
/usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin/pg_ctl -D /shared/postgres_data_new -l logfile start
Ign:1
buster-pgdg InRelease
Ign:2
buster/updates InRelease
Err:3
buster-pgdg Release
404 Not Found [IP: 151.101.67.52 80]
Err:4
buster/updates Release
404 Not Found [IP: 151.101.2.132 80]
Ign:5
buster InRelease
Ign:6
buster-updates InRelease
Err:7
buster Release
404 Not Found [IP: 151.101.2.132 80]
Err:8
buster-updates Release
404 Not Found [IP: 151.101.2.132 80]
Get:9 https://deb.nodesource.com/node_15.x buster InRelease [4,584 B]
Reading package lists...
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
The following additional packages will be installed:
postgresql-client-10
Suggested packages:
postgresql-doc-10
The following NEW packages will be installed:
postgresql-10 postgresql-client-10
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 6,441 kB of archives.
After this operation, 30.6 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Err:1
buster-pgdg/main amd64 postgresql-client-10 amd64 10.17-1.pgdg100+1
404 Not Found [IP: 151.101.195.52 80]
Err:2
buster-pgdg/main amd64 postgresql-10 amd64 10.17-1.pgdg100+1
404 Not Found [IP: 151.101.195.52 80]
Stopping PostgreSQL 13 database server: main.
check for "/usr/lib/postgresql/10/bin" failed: No such file or directory
Failure, exiting
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPGRADE OF POSTGRES FAILED
Please visit
for support.
You can run ./launcher start app to restart your app in the meanwhile
FAILED
--------------------
Pups::ExecError: /root/upgrade_postgres failed with return #<Process::Status: pid 50 exit 1>
Location of failure: /pups/lib/pups/exec_command.rb:112:in `spawn'
exec failed with the params "/root/upgrade_postgres"
9f400ba2cca88f79359496e95027cf26c2d5a3672837c5594793cf723585407b
** FAILED TO BOOTSTRAP ** please scroll up and look for earlier error messages, there may be more than one.
./discourse-doctor may help diagnose the problem.