10. Migrating cubicweb instances - benefits from a distributed architecture

10.1. Migrate apache & cubicweb

Aim : do the migration for N cubicweb instances hosted on a server to another with no downtime.

Prerequisites : have an explicit definition of the database host (not default or localhost). In our case, the database is hosted on another host.

Steps :

  1. on new machine : install your environment (pseudocode)

    apt-get install cubicweb cubicweb-applications apache2
    
  2. on old machine : copy your cubicweb and apache configuration to the new machine

    scp /etc/cubicweb.d/ newmachine:/etc/cubicweb.d/
    scp /etc/apache2/sites-available/ newmachine:/etc/apache2/sites-available/
    
  3. on new machine : start your instances

    cubicweb start
    
  4. on new machine : enable sites and modules for apache and start it, test it using by modifying your /etc/host file.

  5. change dns entry from your oldmachine to newmachine

  6. shutdown your old machine (if it doesn’t host other services or your database)

  7. That’s it.

Possible enhancements : use right from the start a pound server behind your apache, that way you can add backends and smoothily migrate by shuting down backends that pound will take into account.