Good Vibrations for MU Migrations

I just used 10up’s MU Migration plugin to pull the Daily Create (daily.ds106.us) out of the ds106.us multisite, and it was really impressive. You can install MU Migration as a plugin, but also as a package that uses the WP-CLI to make migrations, and it is pretty amazing. It will pull individual subsites out of a WordPress Multisite instance, that can then be imported into a stand-alone WordPress. Or,  going the other way, you can use it to import a stand-alone WordPress instance into a Multisite. It is impressive, especially after the touch and go nature of import/export plugins like All-in-One Migration and Updraft that tend to leave a lot of holes that needed to be plugged.

So, a command like the following (daily.ds106.us had the site id of 10) will pull that sites users, active plugins, active theme, and all database details into a zip file call dailcreate.zip:

wp mu-migration export all dailycreate.zip --blog_id=10 --plugins --themes --uploads

From there you would copy the zip file into the directory were your new install lives, and then make sure MU Migration is working on the site. After that you run the following command to migrate the entire blog (including media, users, themes, plugins, etc.):

wp mu-migration import all dailycreate.zip

The only snag I ran up against was the Daily Blank theme was active on the Daily Create site, but it depends on the parent theme WordPress Bootstrap. Seems like MU-Migration has no way to detect this, so I needed to install Bootstrap as well. Once I did so the entire migration of over 1 GB of media was done in seconds. While this definitely falls under the niche WordPress topic post, if you spend your time like we do at Reclaim Hosting migrating WordPress sites, then this is a definite must for the plugin toolbox.

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9 Responses to Good Vibrations for MU Migrations

  1. Taylor Jadin says:

    I’ve gotta play with this as the potential is kind of huge for lots of WP things that are typically time consuming. This could even be a sort of duct tape backup solution (loop through each blog id and export a zip of each site, then use rclone to upload to an S3 bucket)

    • Reverend says:

      I think if it could be an impressive pipeline for migrations between shared hosting and Reclaim Cloud, for sure. The command line nature of the tool seems to invite such possibilities.

  2. Sarah Honeychurch says:

    Thank you Jim – I really appreciate all the time you put in making sure our Daily Create keeps working.

  3. Alan Levine says:

    That’s nifty to know, past experience was a lot of hoops and manual MySQL to move to and from multisite.

    Also not sure why it would see the Daily Blank theme as a child – I thought I kept DS106’s updated but the current version does not need the parent theme, I made all that functionality rolled into the Daily theme… and speaking of which I am seriously overdue in recasting it to not depend on (or mention) the site formerly known as Twitter.

    Also maybe it was that mail suppression theme, can I have an account in the new standalone daily ds106? I like to do my share of keeping it fresh

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