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Shorten the README; move the technical detail into docs/

Browse Source 
The README keeps what the tool is, how to install it and the first commands,
and points to the guide on docs.ihasmail.org. Everything else moves, whole,
into docs/ and CONTRIBUTING.md, where it is organized for readers who want
the detail. Where the old README disagreed with the code, the code wins.
This commit is contained in:
jcoffey-dev
2026-09-15 12:14:36 -07:00
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docs/docker.md
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# Docker deployments
How `run` migrates a Stalwart running in a Docker container: the flags it
needs, what it carries across, what it refuses, and what it keeps for a manual
restore. For the short version, see the [README](../README.md).
## The container path is unproven
**The container path has never completed a migration against a real Stalwart
image.** What it inspects and what it assembles have been checked against one,
which is how two problems were found and fixed (#11) — but a fake `docker`
still proves only that the right commands are assembled, not that the image
reads the config it is handed and comes up as the server it was.
`run` refuses a container deployment unless you pass
`--container-path-unproven`, which is there so nobody reaches it without being
told. Rehearse on a clone first ([rehearsal.md](rehearsal.md)); that advice
goes double here.
## Flags
- `--target-image` names the image in full, e.g.
`stalwartlabs/stalwart:v0.16.14`. It is never derived from the running
container by swapping the tag — that is wrong for a digest-pinned image, a
mirror or a fork, and being wrong means pulling the wrong software into a
mail server.
- `--container` names the container (default `stalwart`).
- `--data-dir` must name the path **inside** the container, since that is
where its data actually lives. `preflight` says so if it matches none of the
container's mounts.
## What cutover carries across, and what it refuses
A container cannot be edited in place the way a unit file can, so cutting one
over means rebuilding it. A container rebuilt without its capabilities, its
custom network or its device mappings starts cleanly and is quietly not the
server it was.
So cutover carries across what it understands and refuses outright when it
finds anything else, naming what it found. It asks that question in
`preflight`, while the server is still running, rather than only at cutover
after it has stopped.
**It carries:** mounts, ports, environment, restart policy, labels, and
anything the container overrides on its image — a `--user`, an
`--entrypoint`, a command of your own. What the container merely *inherits*
from its old image is left to the new one, whose own defaults are the ones
that go with it.
**It refuses:**
- a container with settings it doesn't understand, such as extra
capabilities, a custom network or device mappings;
- a container whose data is not on a volume — an upgrade replaces the
container, and the writable layer goes with it;
- a container managed by Docker Compose, because recreating it out from under
compose leaves the container and the compose file disagreeing about what is
deployed, and the next `compose up` reverts the migration. Compose
deployments are migrated by editing the image tag in the compose file and
running `compose up -d`.
## Where the converted config goes
The converted v0.16 config is written into the host side of whichever mount
covers `--data-dir`, named on the container side, and the recreated container
is started with `--config` pointing at it.
It cannot go anywhere else: cutover recreates a container with the mounts it
had and cannot invent a new one. The official image's own default is
`--config /etc/stalwart/config.json`, which is a *different* volume, so a
container left to that default would come up on whatever the old version had
left there. If your container overrides its command, cutover refuses rather
than merging the two — both are the container's argv and there is no honest
way to guess.
## What it keeps
The old container is renamed rather than removed, the old image is never
pruned, and the container's `docker inspect` is preserved as an artifact before
anything is replaced. Together those are the manual restore path — see
[recovery.md](recovery.md), which applies here exactly as it does to a binary
install.
Measured on a full migration: the store converts in seconds, and the service
was down for **6 seconds** end to end. Plan the window around verification,
not data volume.
docs/known-stalwart-problems.md
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# Known Stalwart problems
Things about Stalwart's 0.15 → 0.16 upgrade that bite, and what to do about
each: the two server fixes you must make first, the administrator account,
the settings Stalwart's converter drops without saying so, the certificate on
the mail ports, and the extra recovery boot some store migrations need. For
the short version, see the [README](../README.md).
## Two things you must fix on the server first
Neither is something this tool can do for you, and both stop a migration dead.
`preflight` refuses on both, while the mail server is still running — but they
are worth knowing before you book a maintenance window, because fixing them is
a change to your directory, not a flag.
### Remove or collapse multi-tenancy
v0.16 requires a tenant-scoped account to sit on a domain owned by that same
tenant, for its primary domain and every alias. v0.15 imposed no such rule, so
an install that is perfectly valid today can be unrepresentable in v0.16.
Run `stalwart-migrate tenants` to see who owns what.
- Where a domain has no tenant of its own and only one tenant's accounts use
it, the conversion repairs it for you.
- Where two tenants genuinely share a domain, nothing can. Resolve it in v0.15
first: give each tenant its own domains, move the accounts into one tenant,
or remove the tenants entirely.
### Migrate as a directory account, not the built-in admin
A `[authentication.fallback-admin]` from `config.toml` authenticates perfectly
well right up to the moment the migration finishes, and then stops existing —
v0.16 keeps its configuration in the store, so the block defining it is never
read again. The migration itself still succeeds; what you lose is the ability
to verify it, recalculate quotas, or administer the server afterwards. The
next section has the detail.
## You need a named admin account before you migrate
**A config-file fallback admin will not survive the migration.** If the only
administrator you have is an `[authentication.fallback-admin]` block in
`config.toml` — which is what `stalwart --init` sets up — you will come out of
the migration unable to administer the server.
Create a real account in the directory, with the admin role, and confirm you
can log in as it *before* migrating. Four separate reasons, verified against a
real 0.15.5 → 0.16.14 migration:
1. **v0.16 keeps its configuration in the store, not in a file.** After the
migration the server is started with a config that is little more than a
pointer at the data store, so the old `config.toml` — and the
fallback-admin block inside it — is no longer read at all. That credential
simply stops existing.
2. **`migrate_v016.py` gives every migrated account the `User` role**,
whatever it held before. An account that was an administrator in v0.15
comes out authenticating normally and refused every management operation.
`rehearse` generates the operation that restores it — but the account has
to exist in the directory for there to be anything to restore.
3. **The account's local part must be unambiguous.** v0.16 identifies an
account by local part plus domain, so if `[email protected]` and
`[email protected]` both exist, this tool refuses to restore either role
rather than risk granting administrator rights to the wrong one. It says so
rather than guessing; you then grant it by hand.
4. **The role has to survive, not just the account.** `tenant-admin` has no
v0.16 equivalent and is not restored, so an account whose rights came only
from it authenticates afterwards and is still refused management
operations. Preflight cannot check this — it cannot know which roles the
converter will carry across — so confirm on a clone, or immediately
afterwards, that the account can still administer the server.
`preflight` refuses to proceed if the account you authenticate with is not in
the directory, so this is caught before anything is touched rather than after
the migration completes.
**The practical check:** make sure you can authenticate to the admin API as a
directory account — not as the fallback admin — that its local part is unique
across your domains, and that it holds admin rights through a role other than
`tenant-admin`.
## Stalwart's own converter silently drops ACME
`migrate_v016.py` consumes every `acme.*` setting and emits nothing for them.
They are **not** reported as unmigrated either, so nothing warns you: the
certificate carries over, the provider that renews it does not, and TLS keeps
working until the certificate expires roughly ninety days later.
Check for `acme.*` in your dump before migrating, and recreate an
`AcmeProvider` afterwards if there was one. `accountKey` is server-set in
v0.16, so the existing ACME account cannot be carried over — the server
registers a new one on first issuance.
This tool does not yet generate that object for you. It should: the
supplemental plan already does the equivalent for listeners.
[ARCHITECTURE.md](../ARCHITECTURE.md) §4.6a lists what else the converter drops.
## A certificate that serves HTTPS may not serve the mail ports
A `Certificate` object carried into v0.16 with the right SAN is picked up by
the HTTP listener on its own. **IMAPS, SMTPS and POP3S are not**: they keep
serving a self-signed certificate until `defaultCertificateId` is set on
`SystemSettings` and the server is restarted.
This is the kind of thing that looks fine from a browser and surfaces as a
mail client complaining days later, so check it as part of your
post-migration verification: connect to 993 or 465 and confirm which
certificate you are handed, not just to 443.
This tool does not set it for you. Like the `AcmeProvider` above, it should,
and the supplemental plan is where it belongs. Reported by
[@kaya-eu](https://github.com/Coffey-Labs/stalwart-migrator/issues/1).
## The store migration may need one more recovery boot
**This one is open, and it is the reason to rehearse on a clone.** The
recovery cycle boots the target version once, replays your settings into it,
and stops. Across three real migrations, two different failures showed up
that one extra recovery-mode boot cured:
- the settings apply failing on its very first object with
`primaryKeyViolation`, where re-running the identical apply against a fresh
recovery boot went straight through; or
- the next normal start panicking with *"Upgrading to version 0.16 is a
multi-step process"*, where booting recovery mode once more, letting it come
up and stopping it cleanly was enough.
Never both on the same run — whichever appeared, one more recovery boot
before the real start got past it. That panic is Stalwart's own, and it
suggests the store migration is not finished when the single boot exits.
The likely fix is a settle boot after the apply. **It is not in the tool**,
because getting an extra recovery boot wrong is its own hazard — see [Do not
boot recovery mode again
afterwards](recovery.md#do-not-boot-recovery-mode-again-afterwards). If you hit
either failure, the extra boot is a manual step. Reported by
[@kaya-eu](https://github.com/Coffey-Labs/stalwart-migrator/issues/1).
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# Recovery
What happens if a migration fails: why recovery is your snapshot and not this
tool, what a restore costs, what the tool keeps to make a manual restore
easier, and the one thing never to do on a migrated server. For the short
version, see the [README](../README.md).
## Recovery is your job
**This tool does not undo a migration.** There is no `rollback` command.
Recovery from a failed migration is your own snapshot or backup, taken by
whatever method you already trust and know how to restore — a ZFS, LVM or
btrfs snapshot, a VM or volume snapshot, or a restorable backup. Choosing that
method, taking it, and verifying you can actually restore from it is out of
scope for this tool: it does not take one, does not check that one exists, and
cannot restore from one.
Cutover refuses to start until you confirm a recovery point exists, with
`--recovery-point-confirmed`. That confirmation is an acknowledgement, not a
check — nothing here can verify your snapshot. Its only purpose is that nobody
migrates a production mail server having never been asked the question.
A failed run stops and reports; a person decides what to restore.
**Take the snapshot with the service stopped** if you want a clean one. A
snapshot of a running Stalwart is crash-consistent rather than clean; RocksDB
will usually recover from its WAL, but "usually" is doing real work in that
sentence.
## Restoring from a snapshot loses mail delivered since
Reverting to any pre-migration recovery point discards mail delivered between
taking it and restoring it. This is inherent to restoring a point in time and
this tool cannot solve it — plan your migration window with that in mind, and
consider holding inbound mail at a secondary MX for the duration if the gap
matters to you.
## What the tool keeps to make a manual restore easier
- **The old binary is preserved**, never deleted, next to the new one as
`<binary>.v<old-version>` — so putting things back doesn't depend on
re-downloading a specific old release under pressure.
- **The original service definition is preserved** as `<unit>.pre-<run-id>`
before cutover rewrites it, so you aren't reconstructing a unit file from
memory. For a container, the old container is renamed rather than removed
and its `docker inspect` is kept; see [docker.md](docker.md).
- **The settings and principals dumps, the apply plan and its supplement** are
kept in `<state-dir>/<run-id>` — `/var/lib/stalwart-migrator/runs/<run-id>`
unless you moved it. These four are the only files in a run that cannot be
produced again afterwards: the dumps need a live pre-migration instance, and
the plan is what was actually replayed into your store. They are kept
whether or not the run succeeded and whether or not you passed
`--keep-artifacts`.
- **Every artifact path and checksum is in the checkpoint**, and
`stalwart-migrate status <run-id>` prints exactly which steps completed and
which failed — which is the first thing you want when deciding what to
restore.
None of this is a substitute for the snapshot. It's what makes the twenty
minutes after restoring one less unpleasant.
## Do not boot recovery mode again afterwards
The migration works by starting the new version once in recovery mode,
replaying your settings into it, and stopping it. That is a one-time step in a
migration, and it is not a general-purpose maintenance mode.
An operator who booted recovery mode again — the same way the migration does,
`STALWART_RECOVERY_MODE=1` against the same data directory — for reasons
unrelated to the migration, on a server that had migrated successfully days
earlier, found that `Domain` and `Account` queries came back empty on the next
normal start. This happened twice, on two different servers. It was not a
stale read: creating a domain that had certainly existed a moment earlier
succeeded, with no `primaryKeyViolation`, so the records were genuinely gone.
Disk usage did not change.
What recovered it both times was re-applying that run's `export.json` and
`supplement.json` against a fresh recovery boot, which is why those two files
are kept for you. If you need to change something after a migration, use the
admin API or `stalwart-cli` against the running server.
This is Stalwart's behavior rather than this tool's, and it is recorded here
because this tool is where you learned the technique. Reported by
[@kaya-eu](https://github.com/Coffey-Labs/stalwart-migrator/issues/1).
This is different from the one extra recovery boot some migrations need
*during* the migration, before the first normal start; see [known Stalwart
problems](known-stalwart-problems.md#the-store-migration-may-need-one-more-recovery-boot).
## Why it works this way
An earlier version of this tool implemented rollback itself: it restored the
filesystem backup, verified every restored file against a manifest, replayed
SQL dumps, reinstalled the old binary, and re-validated the result. It was
tested and it looked good.
It was removed, because restoring bytes correctly is not the hard part. It
copied contents and permissions but not *ownership*, so run as root it would
have produced a byte-perfect, checksum-verified, root-owned data directory
that Stalwart, running as its own user, could not open — and it would have
reported success. A filesystem snapshot has no such failure mode, because it
never lost the metadata to begin with. [ARCHITECTURE.md](../ARCHITECTURE.md)
§4.8 records the full reasoning.
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# Trying it safely, and rehearsing
How to find out what a migration will do before it does it: running
`preflight` safely, what `rehearse` reports, and how to rehearse the whole
migration on a clone of your server. For the short version, see the
[README](../README.md).
## Running preflight
`preflight` is the sensible starting point. Its checks against the Stalwart
installation are read-only:
```sh
sudo go run ./cmd/stalwart-migrate preflight
```
It still needs write access, because it records the run as a checkpoint before
doing anything else. Without it, you see:
```
create run: checkpoint: create run directory:
mkdir /var/lib/stalwart-migrator: permission denied
```
Checkpoints go to `/var/lib/stalwart-migrator/runs` by default
(`checkpoint.DefaultBaseDir`). Either run as root, pre-create that directory
writable, or point `--state-dir` somewhere writable. `run` and `rehearse` also
take `--work-dir` for their scratch space, which is a different directory and
does not move the checkpoint store.
Pass `--admin-url` and `--admin-user` for the reachability check, and the
password with `--admin-password` or `STALWART_MIGRATE_ADMIN_PASSWORD`.
## What rehearse reports
```sh
stalwart-migrate rehearse --admin-url https://mail.example.com \
--admin-user admin --target 0.16.14
```
It runs preflight, dumps your settings and principals, converts them with
Stalwart's own `migrate_v016.py`, and reports **both halves** of the result:
the apply plan of what will carry over, and the worklist of what will not.
It copies no data, clones nothing, starts no server, and never writes to the
store, so it is safe to run against production repeatedly and without a
maintenance window.
### The supplemental plan
It also generates a **supplemental plan** for the part it can rebuild
automatically — currently your network listeners, which is the difference
between a migrated server that answers and one that doesn't — and reports
exactly how much of the worklist that covers (on a test instance: 24 of 3,505
keys, and it says so rather than implying more).
`run` generates the same supplement and applies it after `export.json` for you.
If you are replaying a rehearsal's plan by hand instead, review it, then apply
it after `export.json`:
```sh
stalwart-cli apply --file <state-dir>/<run-id>/supplement.json \
--url https://mail.example.com
```
It is applied after `export.json` rather than merged into it on purpose: the
official conversion is the authority on everything it handles, and a generated
plan that overlapped it could silently override a correct mapping with a
guessed one.
### Reading the worklist
The worklist is long but mostly not work, and `rehearse` says which is which.
Measured against a real production instance, `migrate_v016.py` carried
**219 of 12,401 settings**. Of the 12,182 it left:
- **8,547** are runtime auto-ban state that repopulates itself
- **3,337** are stock spam-filter and lookup data v0.16 ships its own copies
of — restoring v0.15's would revert a year of upstream updates
- **~224** were already carried another way, DKIM signatures included
- **~293** genuinely need your eyes
`server.listener` is in that third group only because this tool regenerates it
for you; without that a migrated instance answers on no ports at all.
### What it keeps
The conclusions are preserved under `<state-dir>/<run-id>/` —
`/var/lib/stalwart-migrator/runs/<run-id>/` by default — as `export.json`,
`unmigrated.txt` and `supplement.json`, even though the rest of the scratch
directory is cleaned up (unless you pass `--keep-artifacts`).
### Why it replaced a dry run
`rehearse` replaced an earlier `run --dry-run` that cloned the data directory
into a sandbox and migrated the copy. That proved the store opens, at the cost
of copying it twice — while the half that found every real problem needed no
copy at all. [ARCHITECTURE.md](../ARCHITECTURE.md) §4.9 has the reasoning.
## Rehearse on a clone first
`rehearse` is read-only and stops short of the half that matters: it converts
your settings but never applies them, and applying is where a real migration
fails. A clone closes that gap, and on a 2.4 GB store it costs about six
seconds of production downtime to build.
1. **Copy the data directory with the service stopped.** RocksDB is
single-writer, so a hot copy may be torn — and a rehearsal on a torn store
fails for reasons production never would, or passes when it should not.
Stop, `cp -a` the data dir to the same disk, start again, archive it
afterwards; the service is down only for the local copy.
2. **Give the guest no route off the host.** A clone of a live mail server
will otherwise renew certificates for your real domains and deliver
whatever is in the outbound queue. In libvirt that means a network with no
`<forward>` element. Verify it from inside the guest rather than assuming.
3. **Run the real thing**: `preflight`, then `run` with `--target-binary`,
`--stalwart-cli` and `--migration-script` pointed at locally staged copies,
since an isolated guest can download nothing.
4. **Snapshot the guest while it is shut down**, so a failed attempt costs
seconds to reset rather than a rebuild.
### What it caught
None of these could be expressed by the mock:
- a multi-tenant arrangement v0.16 cannot represent;
- `--target-binary` never reaching preflight, so an air-gapped host failed on a
release lookup;
- an `admin` account that was a config fallback-admin and stopped working the
moment the migration finished;
- `tenant-admin` roles the converter does not restore.
### What isolation costs
Two things the isolation costs, so they are not mistaken for faults: the guest
cannot fetch the v0.16 web interface, so `/account/` returns 404, and
certificate renewal cannot be exercised at all.
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# Status and field reports
What works today, what `run` does, what has been tested against real servers,
and the state of each package. For the short version, see the
[README](../README.md).
## Commands
| Command | State |
|---|---|
| `stalwart-migrate preflight` | **Works** — read-only checks and a migration plan |
| `stalwart-migrate rehearse` | **Works** — read-only; converts your settings and reports what won't carry over |
| `stalwart-migrate run` | **Works** — performs the migration; `--recovery-point-confirmed --yes`. Container deployments additionally need `--container-path-unproven` (see [Docker deployments](docker.md)) |
| `stalwart-migrate tenants` | **Works** — read-only; who owns which domain, and what would block a migration |
| `stalwart-migrate status <id>` | **Works** |
| `stalwart-migrate report <id>` | **Works** — prints what validation found for a run |
Run `stalwart-migrate <command> -h` for the current flags of each.
## What `run` does
`run` performs the migration in this order:
preflight → stage → dump → stop → convert → recovery-mode → cutover → validate
It needs two flags: `--yes` (intent) and `--recovery-point-confirmed` (a claim
that you have a snapshot or backup you have verified you can restore — this
tool cannot undo a migration and will not start without it). Start with
`rehearse` first: it is read-only, needs no maintenance window, and tells you
what `run` will and won't carry over. See [rehearsal.md](rehearsal.md).
An interrupted run resumes from its last completed step with
`stalwart-migrate run --resume <run-id>` and the same flags; `status` lists run
IDs and shows which steps completed.
### Validation after cutover
After cutover, `run` compares the migrated instance against the snapshot
preflight took, and fails the command if an account that existed before is
missing from it. A domain that no longer appears is reported as a warning
rather than a failure: the two versions do not agree on what counts as a
domain — principals on one side, `Domain` objects on the other — and failing a
migration over that difference would abort runs that lost nothing.
The service is left running either way. By that point the store has been
migrated in place, so stopping it would not undo anything; your recovery point
is the way back (see [recovery.md](recovery.md)). `report <run-id>` prints the
same finding again later. Where preflight had no admin URL to snapshot from,
validation reports itself as skipped rather than passed.
## Field reports
### A production server, 2026-08-25
The tool took a live server — nine domains, six accounts, a 2.4 GB RocksDB
store — from 0.15.5 to 0.16.19 with **8 seconds** of downtime, every phase
green including post-cutover validation, mail flowing before and after. That
run was preceded by a full dress rehearsal on a clone of the same server, which
is the practice this project most recommends copying: see [Rehearse on a
clone first](rehearsal.md#rehearse-on-a-clone-first).
### Three servers, reported in issue #1
[@kaya-eu](https://github.com/Coffey-Labs/stalwart-migrator/issues/1)
reported three successful 0.15.5 → 0.16.19 migrations on three servers: a
testing and a production instance, each 16 domains, 55 accounts and roughly
**221 GB** of real mail, and an arm64 home server of 1.4 GB across 181 folders.
Read that with two qualifications:
- **They ran a commit predating the automated Docker cutover**, so they
performed the cutover by hand. What those runs exercised is preflight, the
dumps, the settings conversion and the recovery-mode store migration, not
the container cutover.
- **They hit things worth knowing about before you follow them:**
- an arm64 binary that was fetched for the wrong architecture (fixed);
- a store migration that needed one more recovery-mode boot than the tool
performs (**not fixed** — see [The store migration may need one more
recovery
boot](known-stalwart-problems.md#the-store-migration-may-need-one-more-recovery-boot));
- data loss from booting recovery mode again *after* a completed migration
(see [Do not boot recovery mode
again](recovery.md#do-not-boot-recovery-mode-again-afterwards)).
## Code
Roughly 14,600 lines of Go, standard library only, of which about 6,300 are
tests. Every phase exists as a package, and `run` wires them into the
migration described above.
Lines are implementation only; each package carries its tests alongside.
| Package | Lines | Tests |
|---|---|---|
| `internal/stalwartapi` | 1456 | yes |
| `internal/backup` | 1333 | yes |
| `internal/preflight` | 1035 | yes |
| `internal/applyplan` | 913 | yes |
| `internal/cutover` | 784 | yes |
| `internal/recovery` | 431 | yes |
| `internal/checkpoint` | 406 | yes |
| `internal/validate` | 382 | yes |
| `internal/stage` | 233 | yes |
| `internal/service` | 201 | yes |
| `internal/plan` | 130 | yes |
| `internal/config` | stub | — |