I have been careless today. I was trying to delete an empty folder in my directory, only to discover that I just accidentally deleted the entire forum. So, I went ahead and reinstalled Flarum via PuTTY/Composer. My question is, I would like to have this new reinstall use the same database as the previous one (meaning, rather than starting all over again, that I can restore the progress I made from the old forum install). Is there a way I could do that? Please help? Thank you.

You need to tie in your old database to the new install. Also any extensions you had added you'll want to put them back in your composer.json file. If you used my script then you probably don't have the database user password any longer. That means you'll need to log into mysql as root and update the password for the user of that database. Avatars are lost. You'll want users to make a new one.

Reinstalling Flarum and "restore" data from the old database?

jordanjay29

adriculous Alternatively, you can install a fresh copy of Flarum and import your old database, as long as it's the same version. You may want to drop any uninstalled extensions (or install them before importing) from your settings > extensions_enabled field in the database (you can search your import file before uploading it for extensions_enabled and edit the field there, or paste that line here and we can help).

This makes it a little easier if you don't have direct access to your MySQL settings (such as if you run it through cPanel or another control panel) or knowledge to do this.

adriculous

I have work today, so I'll work on it when I get home later. I tried last night but I got an error that looks like this:

I used the exact info from my previous installation (same db, same db password, etc.) and I got that instead. I can create another database and import the old one in there as you said, but I want to see if there's a way that can fix this error first.

adriculous

This one, sorry

And there's only two of us, me and my friend, so I won't have to worry much about the avatars.

jordanjay29

You can ignore the deprecated warning.

The second one tells you what the problem is. You already have a database table present, you have to drop the current database tables.

adriculous

jordanjay29 To clarify things, should I create a new db and restore the old DB to it before installation? Or do I use the same db, I drop all the tables, use the same db, then restore it with the old data?

jordanjay29

adriculous Either #2, or import the data AFTER installation.

adriculous

I'm getting all sorts of errors. I went with a new database, installed it, then restored the old data from the previous database to this one. I tried the other way around before (restore the data before installing it) but I got a lot of errors also. I don't know what to do from this point. None of the forum threads created (for testing) are loading properly.

Any advice? http://wellspringdreams.club

jordanjay29

Don't forget to run php flarum cache:clear as a precautionary step any time you see errors. Then hard refresh your browser to see if that clears it up.

If you still see problems, enable debug in your config.php, we need to see what the errors are that's stopping it up.

adriculous

I tried php flarum cache:clear, it's still the same. I have a copy of my old config.php and uploaded that. It works, somewhat, but I'm still getting the same errors. That deprecated note on top is still there.

Edit I changed the database of my old config.php to the current one, still getting errors. "debug" is already enabled.

jordanjay29

I can't even get the debug window to appear. I think this problem goes deeper than a simple restore.

Honestly? It looks like you didn't have a lot of content, I'd just reinstall Flarum fresh and redo the topics.

adriculous

jordanjay29 The truth is, it's not the topics that I'm worried about. It's more of the customizations that I made on the theme. I'll just go ahead and redo the install and start over.

Edit: So, I already typed in php flarum cache:clear and that Zend Framework error message is still popping up on the top. How do I get rid of it? http://wellspringdreams.club/

luceos

adriculous The truth is, it's not the topics that I'm worried about. It's more of the customizations that I made on the theme. I'll just go ahead and redo the install and start over.

If you made those customisations on the files, they are lost. Hence we always recommend using an extension and not editing files in the vendor folder directly. If you made customisations by saving "custom css" in your admin area, they should show up again after the restore was succesful.

Can you clarify the current state or are all your other threads related to this attempt at restoring your forum. If so, please try to consolidate your questions related to this attempt here, it's good to know the history.

adriculous

luceos I decided to start all over from scratch. There aren't that many threads anyway (there were only 2 or 3, but they're test threads), but there were quite a lot of tags created (I have backup notes so I'll just recreate them). I did all my CSS customizations on the "custom css" window, but again, I saved a separate CSS file for it for the record.

I have another issue posted (memory exhaustion) that I'm still waiting for help.

luceos

adriculous closing this one then. Continuing support in the other thread.