upgrading.md

Upgrading

Upgrading to v0.3.0

v0.3.0 adds email notifications with encrypted SMTP credential storage. If you configure SMTP through the dashboard, set ENCRYPTION_KEY in your .env before entering any credentials. If you skip this, credentials are stored as plaintext — functional but not recommended for production.

To generate a key:

node -e "console.log(require('crypto').randomBytes(32).toString('hex'))"

Add it to your .env:

ENCRYPTION_KEY=your-generated-key-here

If you already saved SMTP credentials without a key and then add one later, you will need to re-enter your credentials in the dashboard — the previously stored plaintext values will not decrypt correctly under the new key.

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Before you upgrade

Always back up your database first:

cp discuss.db discuss.db.bak

Upgrade steps

git pull origin main
npm install --production

If running under systemd:

sudo systemctl restart discuss
sudo systemctl status discuss

Schema migrations run automatically on startup. No manual SQL is needed.

Renaming a post URL

If you rename a post's URL after comments have been posted, the comments are still in the database under the old path. To reassign them:

UPDATE comments SET post_url = '/new-path' WHERE post_url = '/old-path';

Run this directly against your SQLite database using the sqlite3 CLI or any SQLite client.

To avoid this situation in the first place, pin threads to a stable key using the data-url attribute — see Embedding.