Cross-host migration & cloning

Moving sites and accounts around a BOA fleet splits into two problem classes, and BOA solves each with a different toolchain.

Within one host — duplicating a site, or moving a site between platforms during a Drupal-version upgrade — is the front-end's job: the Aegir Clone and Migrate tasks, accelerated (and made cheaper to mass-run) by BOA's FastTrack/MyQuick control files. No data leaves the box; the work is a Provision backup/restore plus a Hostmaster node rewrite.

Across hosts — relocating a whole Octopus account, duplicating an account onto a second box, or evacuating an entire server — is the root-side xoct / xcopy / xmass toolchain. These wrap mydumper/myloader (per-account) or xtrabackup + GTID replication (whole-server), freeze the source with a PHP-level http-off 503, rename the moved account in place with renameaegirhost, and convert the old box into a real-IP-recovering reverse proxy until DNS is repointed. The toolchain is storage-aware — each store lands on the target's attached /mnt mount or its root, per the target's disk reality — and its transfer steps are DRY-by-default, running live only with an explicit --live. A related root-side tool, migratefs, relocates account file stores onto attached storage before — or independent of — any move.

A third axis runs through both: TLS is never carried across a machine-name change. Clone, a name-changing Migrate, and every cross-host move auto-disable Encryption on the new node, because the old certificate and ssl_key are bound to the old machine-name. You re-issue deliberately for the new hostname.

Pages

  • Cross-host migration — xoct (single account), xcopy (account copy, source kept live), xmass (whole host via GTID + xtrabackup); the http-off write-freeze and its TTLs; renameaegirhost; and the migration-proxy realip/CSF-trust wiring that keeps per-client bans from blackholing every migrated site.
  • Site cloning & in-host migration — the Aegir Clone and Migrate tasks, the Provision verbs behind them, the FastTrack / MyQuick / ClassicTrack control files and exactly what each skips or parallelises, the MyQuick/restore-task trade-off, and the unconditional Encryption auto-disable on clone and on a name-changing migrate.
  • Aliases & redirects — the hosting_alias data model, pure-alias vs redirect mode, the separate redirection vhost BOA actually emits (not an inline if ($host) block), SAN-cert coverage for aliases, and the add/remove/Verify cycle.
  • migratefs — storage relocation — the operator-only tool that moves account static/files stores and the shared /data/disk/arch archive onto the single attached /mnt filesystem and symlinks them back (DRY plan by default, --apply to run), and the single-/mnt-mount invariant the whole fleet enforces.
  • Importing & exporting sites — adopting a Drupal site BOA did not create (provision-import / hosting-import and platform auto-import), and taking a managed site back out to run standalone (the backup tarball as the export artifact, and undoing BOA's settings.php wiring).

See the Reference appendix for the consolidated control-file and command tables, and Discontinued features for the retired xboa tool and the legacy manual remote_import flow.