Backing up Discourse with RDS
We are launching a community site with Discourse at CircleCI and I ran into some issues with performing backups.
Since we want to be #webscale, rather than installing Discourse using the easy Docker method, we opted to split up the services on AWS.
We are using EC2, RDS, ElasticCache, ELB and S3 for backups. When I initially launched PostgreSQL on RDS I just picked the latest version (9.4 at time of writing) and didn’t put much thought into it. The problem is that the version of pg_dump inside the Docker container provided by Discourse is 9.3. Apparently you are not able to do a pg_dump when your client and server are mismatched.
When you try to do this, you get a sad error that states:
aborting because of server version mismatch
In order to fix this, we need to upgrade the client version on the Docker container (or alternatively avoid this all together by using the same version of PostgreSQL on RDS). Since it is easier to update the client than downgrade RDS, I opted to upgrade the client.
To do this:
- Log into the EC2 Instance that is running Discourse
- Go to the Discourse install location (mine is in /var/docker)
- Enter the container with:
sudo ./launcher enter app - Upgrade the version of PostgreSQL client
apt-get install postgresql-9.4 - Swap out the pg_dump symbolic link for the newer version
ln -s /usr/lib/postgresql/9.4/bin/pg_dump /usr/bin/pg_dump - Perform your backup
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Ten Years of Dreaming of San Francisco
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Fedora Magazine: Contribute to Fedora 44 KDE and GNOME Test Days from Fedora People
- Pluralistic: bunnie's piggyback hack (09 Jan 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Clicks Communicator from Chris Hannah
- A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Announcing Live AI & Design Systems Jam Sessions!
Ian, TJ, and I are excited to announce live AI & Design Systems Jam Sessions with our AI & Design Systems course community! Our first jam session will be Thursday, February 26 at 10AM ET. In these recurring biweekly Zoom […]
via Blog – Brad Frost February 16, 2026I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform
Until recently the LLM tools I’ve tried have been, to be frank, worthless. Copilot was best at writing extremely verbose comments. Gemini would turn a 200 line script into a 700 line collection of gibberish. It was easy for me to, more or less, ignore LLM…
via matduggan.com February 16, 2026Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026)
Today's links The online community trilemma: Reach, community and information, pick two. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bruces x Sony DRM; Eniac tell-all; HBO v PVRs; Fucking damselflies; Gil Scout Cookie wine-pairings; Bi…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow February 16, 2026Generated by openring