The version of Discourse I was running was already three
years old, so I assumed that running the built-in "Update" feature
would suffice. However, after clicking the update button, the progress bar
sluggishly crawled forward over the next half hour, only to display the dreaded
message: "Error – Update Failed." The logs provided little to no
help, but based on my experience with other software updates via GIT, I
suspected that the failure might be due to the repository head still being
called "Master."
In recent years, there has been a shift away from using
"Master" as the repository head, with "Main" becoming the
preferred term. Despite trying several methods to address this issue, including
restarting the droplet and running the update again, I encountered the same
error.
Turning to the traditional method of updating from the
command line, I SSH'd into the server and ran the update command after some
research. Once again, after another half hour, I faced the same result.
Seeking assistance, I contacted DigitalOcean tech support.
Despite their relatively prompt response within 24 hours, their initial answer
did not resolve my specific issue. After further communication, they confirmed
that the 3-year-old version of Discourse was too outdated to update
successfully. Their recommendation was to create a new droplet and perform a
fresh install of the latest Discourse version available.
Over the next three days, I attempted this process at least
ten times, encountering a myriad of errors each time. Despite addressing
numerous errors, new ones continued to appear, halting progress. Eventually,
after resolving all errors, the install script indicated success with the
message "Discourse successfully Installed." However, this turned out
to be false, as Discourse was not running, Docker was not operational, and the
Discourse image was missing.
Feeling defeated, but refusing to admit it, I decided to try one last time, this time
using a larger and more powerful droplet. Despite multiple attempts and several
hours of effort, I made no progress.
At this point, I switched my focus to installing Discourse on a new
image in my AWS DOC instead of DigitalOcean. While doing so, I just happened to stumbled upon the
solution. While verifying the hardware and Ubuntu version I was using at
DigitalOcean, I noticed something peculiar about the Droplet's name.
When creating a Droplet, the name field is pre-populated
with a suggested name that includes abbreviations of various components of the
Droplet's configuration. For example, the suggested name was
"discourseonubuntu2204-s-1vcpu-2gb-70gb-nyc1". However, upon closer
inspection, I realized that the actual name in the terminal window was longer,
including the addition of "tow" at the end.
This discrepancy made me wonder if the long machine name was
causing issues. I vaguely remembered seeing "sethostname" in the list
of errors at one point. Despite my frustration, I decided to test my theory.
I edited the droplet's name to remove about 15 characters
from the end and ran `/var/discourse/discourse-setup` again. To my surprise, it
worked perfectly this time. The installation completed successfully, and when I
opened a browser and pointed it at the new droplet, my brand new Discourse
instance was up and running.
While this experience may be unique, I hope that sharing it
will help others facing similar challenges save time and frustration.
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