Migrating Crowd Between Servers

This guide applies to situations when you may need to migrate Crowd to a new server, because:

Your Crowd server hardware is changing.
You are cloning your production server for a staging, test or development instance.

Preparation

Make sure you have a Crowd license for the new server you are targeting. Developer/staging licenses are available for any commercial or academic license. Create a developer license or contact us for help.
Perform a file system backup of the Crowd Home and Crowd Installation directories.
Perform a full database backup.

From this point on, we will call your existing Crowd server the 'original' server.

Restore the file system and database backups on to the target server.
Locate the shared/crowd-cfg.xml file in the target server's Crowd Home directory. Modify it to point to the new database, if the name/location of it has changed, in this property: <property name="hibernate.connection.url">
Locate the crowd-init.properties file in your target server's Crowd Installation directory. Modify it to point to the new Crowd Home if the location of it has changed.

If your original server serves using HTTPS and the migrated server is on HTTP, you would need to turn off secure cookie with the following SQL query :
```
UPDATE CWD_PROPERTY SET PROPERTY_VALUE = 'false' WHERE PROPERTY_NAME = 'secure.cookie' AND PROPERTY_KEY = 'crowd';
```
Start Crowd on the new server. You should be able to authenticate and access Crowd using the same credentials as on your original Crowd server.

For any application you are going to test against this new Crowd server, you will need to modify the application's crowd.properties file to point to this new server, if the URL is different from the original server's URL.
If you have installed any Crowd plugins or added other customizations, you will need to re-apply them on the new server.

If you encounter any difficulties, please feel free to contact support and let us know which step you are having problems with.