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A company that I'm contracting with has determined that they need to migrate their Chef (Open-Source Edition) instance to a new server.

They do not want to migrate to the Hosted platform.

I have not been able to find a guide for how to do this. Does anyone have guidance or experiences to share, or better yet, a Guide?

I have steps in mind for doing this, but I'm afraid that I'm going to miss something vital. Sadly, their Chef-Server is not managed via Chef...

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  • Are they just moving to different (new) hardware? Can you just make a system backup, and then restore?
    – Zoredache
    Feb 24, 2012 at 17:57
  • They are going to new hardware. I actually hadn't considered a backup/restore... Perhaps I'm overthinking the problem...?
    – gWaldo
    Feb 24, 2012 at 20:10
  • You'll have to decide if you are over-thinking. But if your goal is just to move to better/different hardware, then a backup/restore should be simple, and painless. There are several questions/answers on the site that describe how to move Linux to new hardware.
    – Zoredache
    Feb 24, 2012 at 20:13

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There is a short guide on OpsCode wiki which talks about it.

http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Backing+Up+Chef+Server

The CouchDB backup and restore is more preferred, as also backup and restores the validation.pem, webui.pem, etc.

Like all backup and recovery tasks, do a dry run before a final switch over.

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  • The link is dead. Information for the latest Chef Server version can be found here
    – Stuporman
    Oct 6, 2016 at 4:03
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For Chef Server 11, they switched from CouchDB to Postgres which rules out couchdump. chef_server_backup.rb has also been abandoned, but knife-backup can handle both 10 and 11.

If on both systems you have knife-backup installed and a knife user setup, you can

originalserver$ knife backup export -D ~/chef-backup/

Copy over ~/chef-backup/ to the new hosts and

newserver$ knife backup restore -D ~/chef-backup

Make sure to read the stipulations on knife-backup. Alternatively, you can also push it with multiple knife profiles. Also note when installing, if you're using knife from an omnibus package make sure to call the right instance of gem (/opt/chef(-server)?/embedded/bin/gem).

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