Move your Discourse Instance to a Different Server

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

I believe so, though I didn’t look extra closely. No. The new site will fail to get keys from let’s encrypt if DNS doesn’t point to it. So you’d need to backup, transfer the backup, switch DNS to the new server and then rebuild.

If you want to minimize downtime, what I recommend is Move a Discourse site to another VPS with rsync. This copies over your ssl keys so the new server is ready to go when you do the rebuild.

Unless you’ve upgraded to Postgres 15 already (and maybe even then), what I’d recommend (what I do) is --exclude postgres*, rebuild, and then backup the main site and restore that backup on the new server. When that’s restored, switch the DNS. The rsync directions have you shutdown the datbase so you can copy the raw database files. There are some cases where this won’t work very well, so mostly I make a database-only backup and restore it.

EDIT: I added this to the OP.

@Discourse

Disclaimer added by @pfaffman 2025-09-12T05:00:00Z.

These instructions don’t work well now because you’re now using https and let’s encrypt, which require the new server to have DNS pointed to it so that it can request keys. What I recommend is follow the Move a Discourse site to another VPS with rsync (perhaps using --exclude postgres* and then backing up and restoring the database from the command line.) This is slick since if you know how, you can tweak your local DNS to point to the new server so you can test that it works while the rest of the internet still sees the old site.