Discourse : Oops The software powering this discussion forum encountered an unexpected problem. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The software powering this discussion forum encountered an unexpected problem. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The error message above is what we came across the other day on a clients Discourse Server.

The response from every page was a 500 with that message, which doesn't give much on where to go to get a solution.

If you still have SSH access to the server you are hosting then you're in luck, it's a fairly straightforward fix (for us at least).

Manually update discourse and docker image to latest version

SSH into the server, assuming that you have System Administrator access

cd /var/discourse
./launcher rebuild app

That is essentially it.

The process will take between 5-20 minutes to go through, and a few times it will look as though it's frozed... give it time.