External URL and database reinitialization - how to 'start again' with a fresh clean database? Using Bitnami stack btw

Hi all,

New here so struggling to find the support I need - help appreciated.

I’ve deployed diaspora* using the Bitnami stack’s VM option - nice and simple thus far.

Problem is that regardless of what NIC I attach to the VM I get the initial diaspora* configuration and setup process creating database tables using the internal non-routable network address rather than the external web facing URL that’s been purchased specifically. Changing the settings inside the config settings file clearly happens too late for the database initialization process and regardless of the URL used (internal or external) to configure and setup users they are always given a @192.168.66.1 suffix.

Can anyone point me in the direction of how to force the external URL to be https://example.com and make the database tables reflect this, thus giving users a @example.com address suffix. I’ve searched and all I can see in the help section is ‘you’ll need to start over’ – but that doesn’t really help when using the Bitnami stack which automates the process for you.

Obviously this automation is a ‘good thing’ but doesn’t help someone like me know where and how to make the changes I need to get an external Pod up and running – I don’t want to be gludging around replacing SQL tables manually as I’d imagine this has the potential to break many things moving forwards and would make maintaining this Pod unworkable, what with upgrades, automated patches, migrations etc.

Also - what and where are all the references to my old internal 192.168.66.1 address kept inside diaspora* and how do I make sure that every reference to them is purged and replaced with the external web facing URL, exmaple.com in this case?

Many thanks :slight_smile:

Bitnami is a 3rd-party package and not officially supported, if you have problems with it, you can try following the official installation guides instead (which is the recommended way for different reasons) or ask bitnami support to fix it. In our official guides it’s described that you should set your url in the diaspora.yml first, and then start diaspora and register your account (see here). If bitnami doesn’t do it in that order there is nothing we can do about that, because we have nothing to do with that package/image/installer.

But as described in the help and in the diaspora.yml itself, you should never change this value (except if you only change http to https) after you setup diaspora and registered some accounts. Changing this in the database isn’t recommended and can lead to problems. At least drop your database, and create a new one after you changed the url in the diaspora.yml.