xenforo-conversion

Tools used for a vBulletin to Xenforo conversion. Data transforms, data cleanup, etc.

Configuration

You should be using RVM to load the correct Ruby for this project. This has not been tested with system Ruby on any Linux system, only with the Ruby version listed in the .ruby-version file for this project.

You need to add your own .config/database.yml file in order to use the utilities in this repository. I should look like this:

---
xenforo:
  host: <hostname|IP address>
  port: <port>
  username: <username>
  password: <password>
  type: (mysql|postgres)
  database: <xenforo database name>
vbulletin:
  host: <hostname|IP address>
  port: <port>
  username: <username>
  password: <password>
  type: (mysql|postgres)
  database: <vbulletin database name>

The vbulletin section is optional and only required if you're going to be using tools from this toolkit that transform data from VBulletion to Xenforo.

Once that's done run:

bundle install
bundle exec rake test

And if the tests pass you're ready to use the tools. You should prefix all your calls to the tools with bundle exec.

Tools

`bin/find_and_replace`

Runs a site-wide find and replace across all posts on the site. Useful for converting media embed links from vBulletin to Xenforo format.

Takes three arguments, all required:

<match> -- a plaintext string that needs to match before the post will be considered for further parsing
<regex> -- the regular expression to search the post body for
<replace> -- the regex replacement string to apply to the post body if the <regex> match succeds

And an optional --yes option. Without this option the script merely prints what it would have done and doesn't actually commit any changes to your posts back to the database.

It uses Ruby-style regular expression syntax. You can test your regular expression find and replace patterns here.

Here's an example call that replaces vBulletin-style YouTube video embeds with the Xenforo 1.5.x style:

bundle exec bin/find_and_replace --yes '[video' '\[video=youtube\S*?;(\S+?)\].*?\[\/video\]' '[media=youtube]\1[/media]'

That will find things like:

[video=youtube;t4KIAWNZ5tY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4KIAWNZ5tY[/video]
[video=youtube_share;RkkCDHmBAs8]http://youtu.be/RkkCDHmBAs8[/video]

And turn them in to things like:

[media=youtube]t4KIAWNZ5tY[/media]
[media=youtube]RkkCDHmBAs8[/media]

Note the use of single quotes to ensure that shell expansion and substitutions don't eat your regular expressions. You can see the regular expression in use in this example here.

Because this script runs across all the content in your xf_posts table it can take a long time to run.

You can use it to find and replace things across other tables, not just the xf_post table, by using the --table, --index and --field options. See the Other Examples section below for some other typical find-and-replace operations you can run with the script.

Other Examples

SoundCloud embeds:

bundle exec bin/find_and_replace --yes '[soundcloud]' '[soundcloud]http(?:s)?://soundcloud.com/(.*?)[/soundcloud]' '[media=soundcloud]\1[/media]'
Streamed MP3 embeds:

bundle exec bin/find_and_replace --yes '[mp3]' '[mp3](.*?)[/mp3]' '[media=audio]\1[/media]'
SoundCloud embeds in user signatures:

bundle exec bin/find_and_replace --table xf_user_profile --index user_id --field signature --yes '[soundcloud]' '[soundcloud]\shttp(?:s)?://soundcloud.com/(.?)[/soundcloud]' '[media=soundcloud]\1[/media]'

Development

Continuous Integration

I'm using Travis CI to build and test on every push to the public github repository. You can find the Travis CI page for this project here: https://travis-ci.org/ianchesal/xenforo-conversion/

TODO Work

Please see TODO.md for the short list of big things I thought worth writing down.

Contact Me

Questions or comments about xenforo-conversion? Hit me up at ian.chesal@gmail.com.