Hello,
I launched an update after probably a year, which led to the upgrade from pg 13 to 15.
I’m trying to run the given command with my own LC_LANG but it’s not working, I get FATAL: data directory “/shared/postgres_data” does not exist. And indeed it doesn’t exist… Does anyone have an idea?
There should be a /shared/postgres_old.
Changing your LC_LANG is likely a bad idea.
I actually got the same error than you “/bin/bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale” when I tried my launch rebuild app which led me ultimately to this post, could you solve it in the end? The docker run commands just lead me to more problems, as stated above.
I added a mapping `-v /var/discourse/shared/standalone:/shared` and now I have advanced a bit. It is weird it’s not there though. The problem might be my “app” is still stuck at a version somewhere in 2024 and the “rebuild” does not work. Just a guess…
So I had this in my app.yml and it worked fine:
env:
LC_ALL: fr_BE.UTF-8
LANG: fr_BE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE: fr_BE.UTF-8
I meant LANG and not LC_LANG. The problem is that if I revert to anything else now it’s “too late”. I tried en_US.UTF_8 and nothing, the rebuild always fails.
If you don’t have a current backup and can’t restart your old container, then I’d switch to the PG13 template and get a working setup, then make a backup, then set up a new server and restore the backup there. You can set it up with whatever language you like when it’s an empty database and then do the restore (and maybe the language will magically get converted?).
Moving to a new server ensures that you don’t crash your existing server.
Sadly I’m already in a crashed state. I do have backups but I can’t restore them as the version change is too big and there are problems of dependencies with gem. I also can’t go back to the old version as launcher pulls automatically, a bit sad imo.
With LC_ALL I get:
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/pups-1.3.0/lib/pups.rb
/usr/local/bin/pups --stdin
/bin/bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (fr_BE.UTF-8)
I, [2025-12-02T15:46:29.638999 #1] INFO – : Reading from stdin
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/pups-1.3.0/lib/pups/cli.rb:59:in `split’: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII (ArgumentError)
split = conf.split("_FILE_SEPERATOR_")
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/pups-1.3.0/lib/pups/cli.rb:59:in `run'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/pups-1.3.0/bin/pups:9:in `<top (required)>'
from /usr/local/bin/pups:25:in `load'
from /usr/local/bin/pups:25:in `<main>'
bootstrap failed with exit code 1
** 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.
19a63b958021df0ecbc7e21bfea95f1c5ef7b039efd669b5d4af48b05d397a58
If I remove LC_ALL, then the “./launcher rebuild app” stops at :
Performing Consistency Checks
Checking cluster versions ok
Checking database user is the install user ok
Checking database connection settings ok
Checking for prepared transactions ok
Checking for system-defined composite types in user tables ok
Checking for reg* data types in user tables ok
Checking for contrib/isn with bigint-passing mismatch ok
Checking for user-defined encoding conversions ok
Checking for user-defined postfix operators ok
Checking for incompatible polymorphic functions ok
Checking for not-null constraint inconsistencies ok
Creating dump of global objects ok
Creating dump of database schemas ok
lc_collate values for database “template1” do not match: old “fr_BE.UTF-8”, new “en_US.UTF-8”
With the “manual” docker line mentioned in the top post, I also had to link stuff in /etc/postgresql to /var/… as some files were missing and eventually got the same error than above.
I’ll try a new install and restore there.
I doubt that it’s true that the version change is too big. Have you set up a new server and tried to restore that backup? I’ve restored a backup several years older than the site where it was restored. I’m fairly certain that it’ll work. I move sites to new servers several times a month. the only time there’s been an issue is when there was a corrupt index, which I haven’t seen in quite a while.
Have you tried renaming postgres_old to postgres_data and
./launcher start app
Oh. That’s a good idea! That’s why I should read the whole post before replying. 
I can confirm new install also break with LC_ALL set, in the same way than shown above (_FILE_SEPERATOR_ …). However without LC_ALL it’s fine.
I could restore my save with a new fresh install on the latest master, thanks. Fixing those issues will stay a mistery…
Great!
I moved this to a new topic. If one of my responses was the solution, please mark it so to allow this to get auto-closed