Struggling to understand how to use this from A to Z

[vesper8]

First of all I want to say, you're a godsend for making this! Awesome project really!

I've been trying for the last few hours to migrate my IpBoard4 forum to Flarum.

First I tried using your 3.3 release but it wasn't working out. I installed it globally with composer but that didn't give me access to porter. Eventually I figured out that after installing it globally, you have to cd into the global composer folder ~/.composer/vendor/linc/nitro-porter and run composer install from in there and then you can use porter. Unsure if this is intended but this was not very intuitive to say the least.

From here I was able to perform the migration. I was getting thousands of deprecation warnings and in the end I ended up with a non-functioning forum. So I decided to try the latest dev-main instead since I saw you are doing some good work there to improve the CLI tool.

I had to repeat the above steps and I created a config.php file (porter init does not seem to work yet) and I ran the migration again.

it was quite unclear what the A-to-Z steps are supposed to be. Do I have to first initialize a new Flarum forum and specify the FLA_ prefix so that all my ables will have the FLA_ prefix, and then Porter will populate some of these tables?

I guess that's how it's supposed to work.. I think this should be better explained in the quick start guide.

When attempting to do this, I ran into lots of little issues:

FLA_groups -> name_plural cannot be null, name_singular cannot be null

SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1048 Column 'name_plural' cannot be null (SQL: insert into `FLA_groups` (`id`, `is_hidden`, `name_plural`, `name_singular`) values (6, 0, ?, ?), (7, 0, ?, ?), (8, 0, ?, ?), (10, 0, ?, ?), (11, 0, ?, ?))

FLA_post_mentions_user duplicate entry error for primary key

FLA_tags name cannot be null

FLA_users is_email_confirmed cannot be null

FLA_discussions tag_id does not exist

I think that's it..

Also... what happens to all the passwords? It says that the passwords are handled but.. how does that work?

I will keep an eye on this and hopefully I can use it sucessfully soon.

Thank you very much for your continued efforts!

[linc]

Howdy @vesper8, thanks for the feedback!

Per the usability issues, I've updated the user guide here to be more detailed: https://nitroporter.org/guide

I did entirely miss the composer global install command which is rather important. 😅

Let me know if that is enough additional context or there's still issues you can see.

[fretzl]

Let me know if that is enough additional context or there's still issues you can see.

Since you asked, I believe the path to nitro-porter on MacOS, mentioned in the guide, should be
cd ~/.composer/vendor/linc/nitro-porter
🙏

[linc]

Per the password question, in an IPBv4 to Flarum migration, your passwords should continue to work without additional work. Both pieces of software use the same self-contained password hashing algorithm, which is true of several of the mainline PHP forum platforms these days.

In the event the target forum doesn't support the same algorithm, you'd need a plugin to allow & convert the passwords as each legacy member logs in. To my knowledge, Vanilla is the only platform that does this natively. It's on my list to add this support to Flarum via plugin & better document when it's required.

[linc]

I will post fixes to the individual errors you posted. Note they are only available in dev-main until the 4.0 release (which should be soon).

I have no idea if it's additional rules on Flarum's side or that my testing data just never hit those speed bumps; I find it's better to just create more guardrails than worry about the root cause. Confirmation my fixes work for you would be appreciated when you have time.

Fix for FLA_groups null values: ac3ec6a

[linc]

Fix for FLA_tags name cannot be null: db5d542

Fix for FLA_users is_email_confirmed cannot be null: 267ea5d

Fix for FLA_discussions tag_id does not exist: bb55c63

[linc]

Can I get the full SQL error for this one?

FLA_post_mentions_user duplicate entry error for primary key

I have a hunch about what's happening there but it's a little more shot-in-the-dark than the others.

[linc]

Specifically, the Porter should be ignoring duplicates on that table entirely using insertOrIgnore instead of insert so I am curious whether it's not actually doing that or there's something unique about your MySQL setup I should accommodate.