Ansible script to migrate websites to an AlternC server

This script provides an Ansible playbook to migrate any website hosted on AlternC, Ubuntu, or Debian to a standard AlternC server.

Migrate between two AlternC servers

Before launching a migration, you must define a variables.yml file. An optional inventory.yml can also be defined if a default configuration must be applied to one or more AlternC servers. The script command is not mandatory, but it is useful for reviewing the full process afterwards with less -r ansible.log.

script -c "ansible-playbook migrate_site.yml -i inventory.yml" ansible.log

A minimalist variables.yml file could be defined as:

---
source:
    domain: www.domain.tld
    cms: wordpress
    host: old.alternc.tld
    user: ssh_account
    key: /home/my/.ssh/id_rsa
    path: /var/www/[...]/www/mywebsite/
    database:
        host: 127.0.0.1
        user: "database_user"
        pass: "database_pass"
        name: "database_name"
target:
    host: new.alternc.tld
    user: ssh_account
    key: /home/my/.ssh/id_rsa
    path: /var/www/alternc/m/mywebsite/www/
    database:
        pass: "new_database_pass"

This example provides a WordPress migration from the old.alternc.tld server to the new.alternc.tld server. The domain associated with the CMS is www.domain.tld, without any aliases. SSH connections are established to both servers using the same account ssh_account and the same key. The AlternC account is identical on both servers.

Inventory usage

Ansible requires Python >= 3.9 on each server. To use a compatible version on older Debian releases such as Buster, we suggest using pyenv and then installing at least Python 3.11.2. inventory.yml is required to define the Python interpreter path, because Ansible autodiscovery may not handle this properly in some cases.

If the source host source.server.tld has a version of Python that is too old, you can run:

curl -fsSL https://pyenv.run | bash
apt install make build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev curl git libncursesw5-dev xz-utils tk-dev libxml2-dev libxmlsec1-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev
apt-get install python3-dev default-libmysqlclient-dev build-essential pkg-config
pyenv install 3.11.2
pyenv local 3.11.2
python -V
pip install mysqlclient

Local python installation must be ran by ssh_account used in variables.yml

In your inventory.yml file:

ungrouped:
    hosts:
        source.server.tld:
            ansible_python_interpreter: "[/home/ssh_account]/.pyenv/versions/3.11.2/bin/python"

Full migration options

---
source:
    domain: www.domain.tld
    #alias: [ cdn.domain.tld ]
    #ssl: true
    cms: wordpress
    #cms_path: htdocs
    #proxy: false|true (default true)
    host: old.alternc.tld
    #port: 2121
    user: ssh_account
    pass: anypassword
    key: /home/my/.ssh/id_rsa
    path: /any/absolute/path/on/server
    database:
        host: 127.0.0.1
        user: "database_user"
        pass: "database_pass"
        name: "database_name"
target:
    host: new.alternc.tld
    port: 2222
    user: ssh_account
    pass: anypassword
    key: /home/my/.ssh/id_rsa
    path: /any/absolute/path/on/server
    alternc: new_alternc_name
    database:
        #host: 127.0.0.1
        #user: "new_database_user"
        pass: "new_database_pass"
        #name: "new_database_name"