@julian the image that v3 uses for node is here:
https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-nodejs-container/

And I'm gonna bet the rhel files like this blob:
https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-nodejs-container/blob/71085a522eda89031ba15b907c3dec07be4a9b0b/6/Dockerfile.rhel7

Is responsible for your npm start...

Actually eyeballing this it looks like what this is suggesting is that command they're running is actually
npm run start

If changing the scripts "start" is all that's needed, and start is actually hardcoded in the nodejs image that's being used, we could fork the nodejs image, change the "start" script to <something>

and then
"scripts": {"<something>": "./nodebb setup && ./nodebb dev" }

or whatever works.

I can confirm that the current master branch https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/commit/a2508161c6eeb715a2ea6e626d1697df76641547 fails to build as well*

That's a bit seperate from getting it to launch at start though.

Then for future releases of NodeBB and instructions all that'd need to be replaced is this line:
oc new-app --image-stream=nodejs:4 --code=https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB.git#v1.1.2 --name="nodebb" -e database=redis,redis__host=redis,redis__database=0,port=8080

w/ the forked nodejs github as opposed to the docker image

Scratch the last bit* looking at the usage of the image file NPM_RUN is an environmental value that can be set, so
oc new-app --image-stream=nodejs:4 --code=https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB.git#v1.1.2 --name="nodebb" -e database=redis,redis__host=redis,redis__database=0,port=8080,NPM_RUN=<something>

Might be all that's needed?

No worries that's what making a database backup will do. If not...only one way to find out!

We left some helpful stuff for anyone else asking about openshift/nodebb back here.

https://github.com/ahwayakchih/openshift-nodebb/pull/16#issuecomment-191250867

Slight Update To Jenkler's approach, not sure in which version this changed* but:
modify the key "value" with the array of users you want to give admin permissions to
"value" : [ "1", "2" ]

as opposed to
"members" : ["1","2"]

Note: the ObjectId() used in the first parameter of the update query is the id of the object found from the find query { "_key" : "group:administrators:members" }
If you have rockmongo you may also just edit the result that you find from { "_key" : "group:administrators:members" }