Version Upgrade Steps from 2.8 to Current

jminer

Hi NodeBB folks!

I run a forum that I've left at 2.8.5 for a long time now as I didn't love the visual changes to 3.x early on and hadn't spent the time to build the mods to make it how my users want. Now it's time for me to take another look at it and start the process and it seems jumping from 2.8.9 to 3.12.1 was a bad idea (I did it in my dev environment).

I figured out some of the issues on my own (like I had to delete markdown-extended) but I can't get the site to build right. I saw a bunch of these errors on build

Deprecation Warning: Sass @import rules are deprecated and will be removed in Dart Sass 3.0.0.

I think I tracked this down to a bug that was fixed in the 3.1 upgrade so I reverted git to 3.1 and ran that update which still didn't fix it.

At this point I reset the theme to default which get it the furthest and doesn't generate the above errors but does still have this plus a few similar others

ERROR in /.build/public/scripts-client/js 1214:2-1269:4
Module not found: Error: can't resolve 'composer/drafts' in '/home/ubuntu/nodebb/build/public'

At this point the site GUI doesn't load individual topics and if I go into the ACP it's still the 2.x version and not the 3.x one.

I figure I will need to blow this up and start over again from backup on my dev environment, so what I'm really asking is what's the upgrade steps I should take from 2.8.9 to 3.12?

Thanks for all the help!

<baris>

You can ignore the sass deprecation warnings, the error you need to fix is the other one. In this case it looks like composer-default is disabled and you need to enable it with ./nodebb activate nodebb-plugin-composer-default and try building again.

You can go directly from 2.8.9 to latest 3.x just make a backup of your database before trying so you can rollback if needed.

jminer

Thanks Baris, that did the trick!

What causes the nearly 300 deprecation warning errors? I'd like to be able to solve those if I could.

<baris>

It is caused by the sass module that is used to process our sass source, most of it is coming from bootstrap so it will have to be fixed upstream https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/40962 and https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/40849.

If you don't want to see them you can downgrade to an older version of sass or silence them. https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/40849#issuecomment-2359038505

<baris>

I've silenced those when building for prod, they will still show up when building in dev mode https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/commit/d75b169cd8ed3d11774127ece9e19c14f3ebd43a

jminer

Awesome, thanks for the info!