macariojames / mu-migration

This WP-CLI plugin makes the process of moving sites from single WordPress sites to a Multisite instance (or vice-versa) much easier. It exports everything into a zip package which can be used to automatically import it within the desired Multisite installation.

MU-Migration

This WP-CLI plugin makes the process of moving sites from single WordPress sites to a Multisite instance (or vice-versa) much easier. It exports everything into a zip package which can be used to automatically import it within the desired Multisite installation.

Install

Requirements

• PHP >= 7.1
• WP-CLI >= 0.23

Via WP-CLI Package Manager (requires wp-cli >= 0.23)

Just run wp package install 10up/mu-migration.

If you run into memory issues when installing the package, it's a known WP-CLI issue. Check this out for a workaround.

Installing as a plugin

Clone this repo onto plugins/ folder, run composer install to fetch dependencies and activate the plugin.

You need to install this on both the site you're moving and the target Multisite installation.

Why do I need this?

Moving single WordPress sites to a Multisite environment (or the opposite) can be challenging, specially if you're moving more than one site to Multisite. You'd need to replace tables prefix, update post_author and wc_customer_user (if WooCommerce is installed) with the new users ID (Multisite has a shared users table, so if you're moving more than one site you can't guarantee that users will have the same IDs) and more.

There are also a few housekeeping tasks that needs to be done to make sure that the new site will work smoothly and without losing any data.

How it works

With a simple command you can export a whole site into a zip package.

$ wp mu-migration export all site.zip --plugins --themes --uploads

The above command will export users, tables, plugins folder, themes folder and the uploads folder to a unique zip file that you can move to the Multisite server in order to be imported with the import all command. The optional flags --plugins --themes --uploads, add the plugins folder, themes folder and uploads folder to the zip file respectively.

You can also export subsites from another multisite instance, to do so pass the --blog_id parameter. E.g:

$ wp mu-migration export all subsite.zip --blog_id=2

The following command can be used to import a site from a zip package.

$ wp mu-migration import all site.zip

If importing into Multisite, it will create a new site within your Multisite network based on the site you have just exported, if importing into a single install, it will override your single install with the exported subsite.

The import all command will take care of everything that needs to be done when moving a site to Multisite (replacing tables prefix, updating post_author IDs and etc).

If you need to set up a new url for the site you're importing (if importing into staging or local environments for example), you can pass it to the import all command.

$ wp mu-migration import all site.zip --new_url=multisite.dev/site

The import command also supports a --mysql-single-transaction parameter that will wrap the sql export into a single transaction to commit all changes from the import at one time preventing the write from overwhelming the database server, especially in clustered mysql enviroments.

You can also pass --blog_id to the import all command, in that case the import will override an existing subsite.

$ wp mu-migration import all site.zip --new_url=multisite.dev/site --blog_id=3

In some edge cases it's possible that MU-Migration won't be able to recognize all custom tables while doing the export of a subsite in multisite so if you need to move non-default tables, you can use --tables or --non-default-tables param. E.g

$ wp mu-migration export all subsite.zip --blog_id=1 --non-default-tables=wp_my_custom_table,wp_my_custom_table_2

If you pass --tables it will export only the tables you have passed. So if you use it make sure to pass all tables that you want to be exported, including the default tables.

After the migration you can also manage users password (reset passwords and/or force users to reset their passwords).

$ wp mu-migration update_passwords [<newpassword>] [--blog_id=<blog_id>] [--reset] [--send_email] [--include=<users_id>]  [--exclude=<users_id>]

E.g

The following command will update all users passwords of the site with ID 3 to new_weak_password.

$ wp mu-migration update_passwords 'new_weak_password' --blog_id=3

This next command will reset all users passwords to a random secure password and it will send a reset email to all users.

$ wp mu-migration update_passwords --reset --blog_id=3 --send_email

Notes

If your theme and plugins have been done in the WordPress way, you should not have major problem after the migration, keep in mind that some themes may experience incompatibilities issue if doing things in the wrong way. (E.g hardcoded links like '/contact' etc) Depending of the codebase of the site you're migrating you may need to push some fixes to your code.

Support Level

Stable: 10up is not planning to develop any new features for this, but will still respond to bug reports and security concerns. We welcome PRs, but any that include new features should be small and easy to integrate and should not include breaking changes. We otherwise intend to keep this tested up to the most recent version of WordPress.

Credits

Created by Nícholas André (@nicholas_io), at 10up.com.

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