Commit 9614caee authored by Pietro Albini's avatar Pietro Albini

Add a README

parent d1d7bf60
# osqa-to-askbot
This project allows you to migrate content from an [OSQA][osqa] instance to
[AskBot][askbot]. It was made for the migration of [Chiedi][chiedi] (by
Ubuntu-it), so it might not migrate everything for your website in the way you
want, and it currently supports only PostgreSQL.
osqa-to-askbot is released under the GNU GPLv3+ license.
## Why this project?
AskBot provides a [way to migrate data from OSQA][askbot-migrate], and for
small websites you can use it without any issues.
The problem is, that script requires you to dump all the OSQA data in one file,
and then it loads it in memory and migrates the data. Our database weights
about 4GB though, and loading all of it into memory is not easily doable.
osqa-to-askbot takes a different approach: it connects to the live OSQA
database, then it loads a small chunk of data and migrates it. This allows to
migrate huge databases without worrying about going out of memory.
osqa-to-askbot also skips already-migrated data, so you can run the migration
multiple times on the same database if you want to reduce the maintenance
window, by doing a full migration in the background and then other small
incremental migrations to catch up with the latest changes.
## Usage
osqa-to-askbot requires a (read-only) connection to the production database of
OSQA, and the instance of AskBot you want to migrate to. AskBot must be
installed already, but you should not create any user nor question if you don't
want to have any conflicts (the IDs are kept from OSQA to AskBot).
First of all you need to install the tool in a Python 2 virtualenv:
```
$ git clone http://code.ubuntu-it.org/ubuntu-it-ask/osqa-to-askbot.git
$ virtualenv -p python2 env
$ env/bin/pip install ./osqa-to-askbot
$ rm -rf osqa-to-askbot
```
Then you can call the tool:
```
$ env/bin/osqa-migrator "dbname=OSQA_DATABASE" /PATH/TO/APP /PATH/TO/ASKBOT/ENV
```
In the command above, you need to replace:
* `OSQA_DATABASE` with the name of the OSQA database. The quoted string is a
[psycopg2][psycopg2] connection string, so if you need to connect to a remote
database you can customize it.
* `/PATH/TO/APP` with the path of your AskBot installation
* `/PATH/TO/ASKBOT/ENV` with the path of the Python environment in which AskBot
was installed. If you installed AskBot globally it's the system Python prefix
(you can get it with `python2 -c "print __import__('sys').prefix"`)
After you migrated all your data, simply remove the tool's virtualenv:
```
$ rm -rf env
```
[osqa]: http://www.dzonesoftware.com/products/open-source-question-answer-software
[askbot]: https://askbot.com
[chiedi]: http://chiedi.ubuntu-it.org
[askbot-migrate]: https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel/blob/master/askbot/management/commands/askbot_add_osqa_content.py
[psycopg2]: http://initd.org/psycopg/
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