Urgent: How to reinstall Flarum without losing data?

BrodyStone21

I thought I had files left over from attempting to install Flarum into www/

My current install was in public_html/, so I thought it would be fine to delete all the files in www/. Apparently all those files are using sym links.

I’m trying to reinstall without deleting the database, that way I can recover all the work I put in. Running ./install flarum shows that the DB is already in use. Can anything be done, or do I need so start all the way over?

This is literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Years ago, I was cleaning up by external HDD which had lots of movies and TV shows on it. Thought I was a directory deeper than I was and ran sudo rm -r ./* Heard my HDD spinning up and it literally sounded like my data was being shredded.

EDIT: Can I reinstall Flarum using a new DB, then once it’s installed, go in and change what DB Flarum uses? Or is that going to break something?

luceos

BrodyStone21 EDIT: Can I reinstall Flarum using a new DB, then once it’s installed, go in and change what DB Flarum uses? Or is that going to break something?

Exactly how you can do it. Install on another clean database, then modify the config.php to point to the old database.

BrodyStone21

luceos okay, I reinstalled using new blank database, then edited config.php and changed the DB information. This appears to have worked, because it let me sign in under my old account, but the forum appears completely blank. All the color theming I had done is gone, there are no discussions, all tags and categories are gone. I already tried doing ./flarum cache:clear any ideas?

EDIT: All extensions are actually completely disabled, and all the extra ones I downloaded are gone.

luceos

BrodyStone21 the composer.json and composer.lock files are the ones that store what extensions are installed, the data from these extensions are still in your database though. No idea what happened with your discussions though, they also should be in the database.

BrodyStone21

luceos do you have any advice on how to recover the discussions and tags or should I just restart? I understand how to create and connect to a database, but if I try to manually pul data out, I’m not going to get anywhere.

luceos

BrodyStone21 reinstall your previous extensions, maybe one of them locked down access to the discussions (like byobu does). Or where these all public extensions?

BrodyStone21

luceos it won’t let me reenable some extensions (tags, flags, likes, mentions). I click the toggle and it just flips back off right away. Also, it shows the only user is the admin user, but there should be more than that. I don’t understand how the admin user was pulled, but not the others.

As far as what extensions I had, I will do my best to list them all: recaptcha, automod, user badges, upload, site map, seo, polls, and I think that was about it. Maybe there was a couple others. I’ll start trying to reinstall them, but idk if it’s going to work if the base extensions won’t even work.

clarkwinkelmann

BrodyStone21 do you have access to a tool like phpMyAdmin or MySQL Workbench? You should be able to quickly check the users and discussions tables. If they are (almost) empty, you must have overridden the previous data somehow. Deleting the Flarum files cannot cause data loss in MySQL. Running the installer against an active database also shouldn't cause any data loss, as the installer will stop as soon as it finds an existing database table.

Don't forget to backup your database regularly as you work on your new forum 😉

BrodyStone21

clarkwinkelmann I could see that the database was 5 MB, so I don’t think I overwrote anything. However, I did not check users.

I’ve decided to start fresh anyway though. The extensions not being enabled by default made me nervous. I don’t want to take the chance that I somehow created a vulnerability, or a forum breaking bug that I would rediscover. I’ve only lost a day of work, so I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Do you know if there is an extension or something for remote DB backups? Maybe to Google Drive or a self hosted server.

luceos

BrodyStone21 Do you know if there is an extension or something for remote DB backups? Maybe to Google Drive or a self hosted server.

https://flarum.org/extension/datitisev/flarum-backup

treyb

luceos https://flarum.org/extension/datitisev/flarum-backup

@BrodyStone21 , this one works fantastically btw!

BrodyStone21

treyb I may purchase it as some point. It depends if I actually see results with my forum.