Migrating Data Between AWX Installations

Introduction

Upgrades using Django migrations are not expected to work in AWX. As a result, to upgrade to a new version, it is necessary to export resources from the old AWX node and import them into a freshly-installed node with the new version. The recommended way to do this is to use the tower-cli send/receive feature.

This tool does not support export/import of the following:

Logs/history
Credential passwords
LDAP/AWX config

Install & Configure Tower-CLI

In terminal, pip install tower-cli (if you do not have pip already, install here):

$ pip install ansible-tower-cli

The AWX host URL, user, and password must be set for the AWX instance to be exported:

$ tower-cli config host <old-awx-host.example.com>
$ tower-cli config username <user>
$ tower-cli config password <pass>

For more information on installing tower-cli look here.

Export Resources

Export all objects

$ tower-cli receive --all > assets.json

Teardown Old AWX

Clean up remnants of the old AWX install:

docker rm -f $(ps -aq) # remove all old awx containers

make clean-ui # clean up ui artifacts

Install New AWX version

If you are installing AWX as a dev container, pull down the latest code or version you want from GitHub, build the image locally, then start the container

git pull                                        # retrieve latest AWX changes from repository
make docker-compose-build                       # build AWX image
make docker-compose                             # run container

For other install methods, refer to the Install.md.

Import Resources

Configure tower-cli for your new AWX host as shown earlier. Import from a JSON file named assets.json

$ tower-cli config host <new-awx-host.example.com>
$ tower-cli config username <user>
$ tower-cli config password <pass>
$ tower-cli send assets.json

Additional Info

If you have two running AWX hosts, it is possible to copy all assets from one instance to another

$ tower-cli receive --tower-host old-awx-host.example.com --all | tower-cli send --tower-host new-awx-host.example.com

More Granular Exports:

Export all credentials

$ tower-cli receive --credential all > credentials.json

Note: This exports the credentials with blank strings for passwords and secrets

Export a credential named "My Credential"

$ tower-cli receive --credential "My Credential"

More Granular Imports:

You could import anything except an organization defined in a JSON file named assets.json

$ tower-cli send --prevent organization assets.json

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