This post is part of the work on a project to migrate a forum from Discourse to Flarum. See the related post here: Migrating a forum from Discourse to Flarum
Of course, in your real life scenario, you will have a database already. But for contributing to the script discourse_to_flarum.php, we need a test database, for reproducing specific situations.
It took a while to figure out how to create a test database…
Initial Setup of a test installation
First, follow the instructions at https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md to setup Discourse with a docker container.
On Fedora, I did:
wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh mkdir /var/discourse git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse cd /var/discourse ./discourse-setup |
I changed the hostname from discourse.example.com to localhost, and used admin@example.com as the E-mail address for the admin account. For the SMTP settings, you must enter values different than the defaults, but I use dummy values and create the admin account as described below.
My values for discourse-setup for a local test installation of Discourse:
Hostname for your Discourse? [discourse.example.com]: localhost Email address for admin account(s)? [me@example.com,you@example.com]: admin@example.com SMTP server address? [smtp.example.com]: my.smtp.example.com SMTP port? [587]: SMTP user name? [user@example.com]: my.user@example.com SMTP password? [pa$$word]: mypassword Optional email address for setting up Let's Encrypt? (ENTER to skip) [me@example.com]: |
To activate the admin user, type these commands:
cd /var/discourse ./launcher enter app rake admin:create |
I use the Email address for admin account specified above, eg. admin@example.com, and I am using the password Demo1234Demo1234! for this test database.
root@localhost-app:/var/www/discourse# rake admin:create Email: admin@example.com Password: Repeat password: Ensuring account is active! Account created successfully with username example Do you want to grant Admin privileges to this account? (Y/n) y Your account now has Admin privileges! |
Now the Discourse instance is running at http://localhost on my Fedora machine, and I can login with user admin@example.com and the password Demo1234Demo1234! (including the exclamation mark).
Just a note, how to start a fresh database again:
launcher stop app launcher destroy app rm -Rf shared/standalone/* |
Then start again with ./discourse-setup as described above!
Creating sample data
To create some sample data, you can use the script https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/profile_db_generator.rb
I have modified that script a little bit, you can see my changes at https://gist.github.com/tpokorra/b2e34238dea0243572e822f649a35bab/revisions.
To execute this script:
./launcher enter app cd /var/www/discourse vi script/profile_db_generator.rb # make some modifications as described in the gist linked above: # unless Rails.env == "profile" becomes: unless Rails.env == "production" # if User.count > 2 becomes if User.count > 3 # users = 100.times.map becomes: users = 10.times.map # topic_ids = 100.times.map do becomes: topic_ids = 50.times.map do # and for replies: 2000.times do becomes: 200.times do RAILS_ENV=production sudo -H -E -u discourse bundle exec ruby script/profile_db_generator.rb |
This is the output:
root@localhost-app:/var/www/discourse# RAILS_ENV=production sudo -H -E -u discourse bundle exec ruby script/profile_db_generator.rb installing gabbler gem Successfully installed gabbler-0.1.0 1 gem installed Creating 100 users .......... Creating 10 categories .......... Creating 100 topics .................................................. creating 200 replies ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ |
Creating a backup
To create a backup of the Postgresql Database:
./launcher enter app sudo -u discourse pg_dump discourse | gzip > /shared/postgres_backup/discourse_pg`date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S'`.sql.gz |
You find the result on your host machine, in directory /var/discourse/shared/standalone/postgres_backup.
I have uploaded this backup of the PostgreSQL database into the discourse_to_flarum repository.