User management in Confluence Server stage/test environments (exporting/importing users)

Question

Hello,

We are working on streamlining our deployment process with Confluence servers. We're managing a highly customized Confluence installation (lots of custom macros, themes, etc). As such, we've been testing content and site updates on a staging environment that we then backup and use to upgrade our prod environment.

The issue is keeping our user accounts during every upgrade. Every time we restore from backup, user accounts appear to be recreated/overwritten (stage overwrite prod). We want to allow user creation on the prod site and only update content, themes, etc from staging to prod without overwriting users.

Is there a way to do this? Perhaps only to export/import user accounts from Confluence?

Shannon S · Answer

Hi Joel,

I'm sorry to hear that the external user management setup won't work for you either.

Unfortunately I have no further suggestions. Your solution to copy the home folder and BANDANA table unfortunately would only cause further issues for you. For example you would get a lot of foreign key constraints. I do not recommend modifying the database in this way to get around the issue.

Hopefully some other users in the Community might have a solution for you.

Take care,

Shannon

Joel Ponce · Answer

Another update:

I'm looking at the Production Backup Strategy documentation. I'm wondering if I can directly copy the Confluence Home folder content to the prod server and copy our bandana table from stage to prod as well (to transfer user macros, etc). I'm trying to find a sure-fire way to copy all content data between deployments but am unsure if this will break other site data, table relationships, etc.

Maybe there's a way to copy only user settings from one database to the other and continue do site restores for everything else (with Crowd for user authentication, etc)?

Joel Ponce · Answer

Hi Shannon,

It looks like Crowd and space imports won't be a complete solution for us then. In our staging environment, we often test out new add-ons, custom macros, and other content settings. Is there a way for us to roll out/"deploy" these changes to our prod environment without overwriting our user tables?

Replicating our installation (as described here) will not help us either since we'd need to recreate the database as well. Please let me know if you have further suggestions.

Joel