Self-hosted, moving from one Custom domain to another ... what's involved?

WriteFreely Instance Admins
1

Hi all,

I just joined the Community here, but I’ve been self-hosting a personal write-freely blog for, IDK, 4-5 years or more.

I want to move to a new domain – nothing radical, I just want to get off of the “.com” tld I’m on now. I’m taking the opportunity to move the installation to a new server, while I’m at it. I see a lot of “moving from a hosted instance to my own custom domain” posts, but I can’t find anything quite like what I’m planning.

I’m running on Debian (bookworm) with Apache (no Docker for me), minimal tweaks to the blog’s appearance.

Is it as simple as doing a clean install on the new server, then copying over the db and config file, and then tweaking the config settings to reference the new domain? Or is this a more complicated endeavor? What-all additional info do you need from me to help answer the question?

Thanks in advance,
nattie

2

Addendum … now I’m looking at the Import / Export functions – looks like they include everything (at least the json does), including view-history, creation/update dates, etc.

It looks like I can just literally create a new writefreely instance, under my new domain, and then import all of the content from my existing site.

Does this sound accurate?

What-if-any history, data, metadata, etc, might I lose this way?

Danke, y gracias
n

3

Ping.

I’m now seeing some really old posts in here ( like this, and this, and others ), all asking the same question – how do we re-import our own WA/WF exported data back into WA and/or WF – and there doesn’t seem to be any official answer.

This is Really Bad.

If there is no way to restore our own exported data back into our own blog, then this is not a backup. It’s not a backup unless you can restore from the backed-up files.

4

Okay … solution.

Matt wrote a quick-and-dirty wfmigrate tool several years ago … this works, both on WA hosted accounts and (I just did it) WF stand-alone instances.

It does not import the Stats, and–tentatively–it might only run on Linux, but it does work.

The link for the tool is here, and here is the source-code plus directions on GitHub.

5

Thanks for bringing this up. It seems like you might’ve already solved this, but for future reference when moving self-hosted WriteFreely across servers, the simplest option is probably just migrating the database itself.

  • For MySQL-backed instances, you can use the mysqldump utility to create a full backup and restore it in the new location, and
  • For SQLite-backed instances, you can simply copy the database file over to the new server

This will included absolutely everything on your instance, including stats and data not included in current export files.

1 Like
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Hi, thanks @matt … I considered just copying over the entire db, but I was worried there might be domain-specific data in there.

After using your migration app, I spent a lot of time inside the db, both the old and new copies, doing side-by-side UPDATEs and stuff (mostly manually updating the view_count fields), and I saw the db is pretty simple, straightforward … and afterwards, yeah, I saw I could’ve just moved the old db over.