Note

I don't have the time to work on this actively anymore. Since Discourse is still in early beta, this importer might not even work anymore. If you want to take over the project, I'll give up this repository to anyone who sends useful and sane pull requests. For more details and discussion, see this thread on Discourse Meta.

If you are interested in this I suggest looking into rikkits fork, where you can find optimizations for biggger forum instances.

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What is this?

This rake task will import all threads and posts of a phpBB Forum into Discourse.

• post dates and authors are preserved
• user accounts are created from phpBB users, they have no login capability, but the mail addresses are set, so they can regain control and gravatar works, if they have one
• there is a test-mode which will just connect to mysql and read posts
• post bodies are sanitized:
  • youtube and soundcloud tags are removed (because discourse does oneboxing for them)
  • bbcode tags are cleaned up
  • newlines are converted to markdown syntax
  • [code] tags are converted to markdown syntax
  • CAPSLOCK and \(^-^)/ symbol-only messages are prefixed with <capslock> and <symbols>

Use at your own risk! Please test on a dummy Discourse install first.

Instructions

• Important: disable your e-mail configuration or you will spam users with hundreds of mails:

  Add this to your environment config:

  config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :test
  config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = { address: "localhost", port: 1025 }

  Start mailcatcher to see when all mails have been sent:

  gem install mailcatcher && mailcatcher --http-ip 0.0.0.0

• Be sure to have at least one user in your discourse. If not, create one and set his username in config/import_phpbb.yml.

• Gemfile: add entry

  gem 'mysql2', require: false
  

• Install header files for mysql, ex. on Debian: sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

• Install gem: gem install mysql2

• Edit config/import_phpbb.yml: insert database connection and discourse_admin username

• Place config/import_phpbb.yml in your discourse/config folder

• Place lib/tasks/import_phpbb.rake in your discourse/lib/tasks folder

• In case of multisite prepend next command with: export RAILS_DB=<your database>

• Run rake import:phpbb

• If everything worked, reset your config and tell your people to reset their password on the new site.

ToDo

• Implement more sanitization
• Detect previously imported posts so migration can be done incrementally

Notes

If you find this helpful or can't get it to work, feel free to pop me a message!