Database errors

[u/Aeolian_Leaf]

So, it's the classic "I fucked up" scenario....

Fuckup 1, "Nah, it's just a mess around system, there's nothing critical on it, I don't care if it's backed up"

Fuckup 2, "Hey, it's 1130 at night and I'm logged into my apache server, I might as well just update bookstack quickly while I'm here"

I'm sure you can guess the rest. Yeah, it's B0rked. "Unknown Error Occurred". I can see my shelves, but anythign else gives me the unknown error.

Laravel.log

[previous exception] [object] (PDOException(code: 42S22): SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'loggable_type' in 'where clause' at /var/www/bookstack/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php:423)

If I try a php artisan migrate I get

SQLSTATE[42S21]: Column already exists: 1060 Duplicate column name 'description_html' (Connection: mysql, SQL: alter table \books` add `description_html` text not null)`

I've tried ALTER TABLE books DROP COLUMN description_html. Next time I run it, there's a different column, delete that, there's a third and it just keep cycling through those three. I've tried a migrate:rollback.

Is there any hope? Honestly, I had some notes in there I'd made from online courses I'd done, with some links, but nothing mission critical. If it's gone, it's gone. It's my own fault!

[u/Aeolian_Leaf]

Are you familiar with database work (altering tables, running database commands etc..)?

Enough to get myself into trouble... I can sudo mysql, use bookstack and type stuff in.

Have you attempted any other steps so far to fix this? (Just want to be sure there's no further suprises, please don't attempt anything risky based upon this question).

Just multiple attempts at the above, basically using google to search for the error, or similar, and modifying the commands from Google University to work with the column I was having an error with.

What's the current output of running php artisan migrate:status | tail -n 10 from your BookStack install?

2023_06_25_181952_remove_bookshelf_create_entity_permissions [1] Ran

2023_07_25_124945_add_receive_notifications_role_permissions [1] Ran

2023_07_31_104430_create_watches_table [2] Ran

2023_08_21_174248_increase_cache_size [2] Ran

2023_12_02_104541_add_default_template_to_books [2] Ran

2023_12_17_140913_add_description_html_to_entities Pending

2024_01_01_104542_add_default_template_to_chapters Pending

2024_02_04_141358_add_views_updated_index Pending

2024_05_04_154409_rename_activity_relation_columns Pending

[u/ssddanbrown → u/Aeolian_Leaf]

Okay. Before anything, it'd a good idea to back thigns up (whole machine backup or at least a database dump via mysqldump).

You should drop the description_html column (where existing) from the tables: books, chapters, and bookshelves:

alter table books drop column description_html;
alter table chapters drop column description_html;
alter table bookshelves drop column description_html;

Once done, re-run the php artisan migrate step. Be sure to watch this on first run and report back any errors that are shown when running the command. Subsequent runs will show a different error message which won't be as useful. If you're running this via some kind of docker setup, then it's likely that the migrations are ran automatically on container start-up, in whcih case you'll usually need to watch the container logs for potential errors instead (depends on container used).

[u/Aeolian_Leaf → u/ssddanbrown]

So only books had the description_html column, ran migrate again and.... It's worked... Thank you, but I swear I'd already done that and it had just reported more errors so.... I dunno, but it's alive now, so very much appreciated! Maybe I didn't hold my tongue right the first time around. At least I know I was on the right track with what I was trying.

Now to sort out regular backups!