Looking for lessons learned related to migrating gnusocial instances in all or partial
10 votes c/freepost Posted by vaeringjar — 10 votes, 4 commentsSource

In the middle of a migration right now for a gnusocial instance. I seek some info from others about their experience.

Most of my internet searches come back with wildebeest migration results instead of how folks can migrate data to and from instances of gnusocial.

Setting up a new instance is very straight forward; I have setup around six in the last two weeks. However, the biggest problem I have run into relates to managing massive dump files. I don’t find this a particularly interesting problem to put my full effort into, and even if I did I lack the time anyway. So due to these, the process has taken much longer than I thought (almost three weeks instead of a weekend).

I could see benefit on a smaller scale, migrating a user account or a group from one instance to another.

EDIT: Context because peers or at least I has/ve taken over gnusocial.no.

What’s the problem? Move the database to the new website?

Well, at the moment, the avatars are all broken.

As for lessons learned, I ran into some bumps along the way. I’ll write back over the weekend with my war stories.

Sorry I really know nothing about GNU Social :( Still willing to help though, if there are any low hanging fruits.

Let’s just break this down. I’ll continue to add and perhaps repost later.

  • Pull the gnusocial software from the repo.
  • Restore the database. This might require making some painful changes to large sql dump files.
  • Restore the files and avatars. This might require batching the restoration of the files if your system runs out of space in the pipe. Or just uncompress directly to the location.
  • Run ~/scripts/update.php.