Why do you need to get a new domain? you can reuse the old one surely.?
Can’t you export the data, keep the old media directories, and import it all into a new install?
I’ve only just updated to 4.2.x because of my worry of trying to upgrade ruby, which wasn’t a smooth process, and I’ve probably got 3 damn copies of ruby in different parts of my filesystem, but apart from that, it was a smooth upgrade after that fiasco.
The technical reason is the nginx service is expecting a domain name so it can route it to the right webserver.
You can use nginx to host multiple domains that get sent to different web servers.
For example, i have a
pixelfed.mydomain
and amastodon.mydomain
configured in nginx, which are both hosted on the same server.If you’re just using an IP address, it won’t know where to forward your requests too.
There might be a “default” config you could use, or maybe you could use an IP in the
server_name
option, but it would be less confusing to just get a temporary domain as u/fruey suggests.