How to Move a Production Discourse PostgreSQL Database to Development

Neo · January 2, 2021, 2:43am

How to Move a Production Discourse PostgreSQL Database to Development

On Your Production Server

Note: This assumes you are running Discourse in a "two container" configuration. Please adjust your container name as required:

docker exec -it data bash
cd /shared
mkdir dumps
chown postgres dumps
su postgres
cd dumps
pg_dump discourse -f discourse.sql 
gzip discourse.sql

Move that file over to your development server using any file transfer utility you like (for example, sftp).

On Your Development Server

sftp> cd /shared/data/dumps/
sftp> get discourse.sql.gz
sftp> exit

Reinitialize discourse_development DB on development server

psql>  CREATE USER postgres;
psql>  CREATE USER discourse;
psql>  DROP DATABASE discourse_development;
psql>  CREATE DATABASE discourse_development;
psql>  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON  discourse_development TO postgres;
psql>  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON  discourse_development TO discourse;
psql>  ALTER USER discourse WITH NOSUPERUSER;

gzip -d discourse.sql.gz
psql -U username -d discourse_development < discourse.sql   #change username to your user name.

If all goes well, you will have a full working copy of your production site on your dev server:

Final Dev Touches

Copy all your uploads in production to your dev server
Set the Rails setting force_https to false
Turn off digests in your admin settings

Footnotes

After doing all the step above, I also copied over our production SendGrid settings, for fun and updated them in ./environments/development.rb just so SMTP mail also works.
You can also use the Ruby mailcatcher gem to catch all SMTP mail.
Don't forget to clone any plugins in production over to dev that you might wish to run in dev