Friday, January 12, 2018

Recipe for Migrating Hippo CMS Database from One to Another

Sometimes people want to migrate an existing database of Hippo CMS from one to another. For example, they have been running Hippo CMS on Oracle database, but after a while they started thinking about moving their on-premise system and database to a cloud platform. Sounds like a typical use case and that there must be some solutions already out there, right?

Well, surprisingly many people don't know that Apache Jackrabbit has provided a repository copying (or "backup" or "migration" as they call in the documentation) tool since v1.6, dated first in 2010!

There are some reasons why people don't know about the useful tool:
  • Many people use a vendor specific Apache Jackrabbit repository implementations from a specific project or product, not the Apache Jackrabbit Standalone Server itself. So, even if the Backup and migration feature is well documented in Apache Jackrabbit Standalone Server page, it is hard for them to follow.
  • Each vendor specific implementation with Apache Jackrabbit, such as Hippo CMS  has some tweaks for their own purposes, including extra libraries on top of the default Apache Jackrabbit modules. So, if users don't know which extra libraries to add more by themselves, it can hardly work for them.

That's why I created a 'recipe' project in one of my GitHub repositories:

The recipe introduces a step-by-step guide, with Hippo CMS specific examples. I think it should be helpful to other Apache Jackrabbit derivatives too. Please browse the source.

Last but not least, many thanks to Apache Jackrabbit Standalone Server tool! Cheers!