jcoffey-dev
28c0fa57cb
Chased down why a migrated instance had no working administrator. The
account authenticated fine and was refused every management call, and the
cause is that migrate_v016.py assigns every migrated account the User role
regardless of what it held before: an account that was `roles: ["admin"]`
in v0.15 comes out the far side as `roles: {"@type": "User"}`.
Ordinary users were never affected - User is what they had and what they
get - and their credentials, mail and mailboxes survive untouched. It is
specifically administrators who lose their privileges, which is a bad thing
to discover after cutting over.
The v0.16 shape came from the server's own schema document rather than the
published reference: GET /api/schema defines x:UserRoles as a multi-variant
type with variants User, Admin and Custom. Account is itself multi-variant,
so an upsert needs its own "@type" too - without it the server rejects the
operation outright ("upsert entry is missing `@type`").
applyplan.AccountRoleOperations restores roles from the principals dump,
emitting operations only for accounts whose role actually changes.
Rewriting every account would be a much larger blast radius for no benefit.
Where v0.15 listed several roles, admin wins - under-privileging an
administrator locks them out, which is the failure being fixed - and the
collapse is reported rather than done silently, as are roles with no known
v0.16 equivalent.
Verified end to end on the smoke VM: rehearse against the real 0.15.5 put
the role operation in the supplement, applying that supplement to a
migrated 0.16.14 whose admin was broken restored management access
(accounts=3), and alice and bob logged in over IMAPS with unchanged
credentials, read their mail, and accepted new SMTP delivery.
Also recorded: x:Account.domainId returns an internal id on v0.16, not a
domain name, so the post-migration directory comparison would read every
domain as missing. Resolving that needs an x:Domain/get call not yet
confirmed against the binary.
stalwart-migrator
In-place upgrade tool for Stalwart Mail Server, 0.15.5 → latest: no data loss, a checkpoint at every step so an interrupted run resumes instead of restarting, and automated validation that the server still works afterwards.
Recovery from a failed migration is your own snapshot or backup — this tool does not undo a migration. See Recovery is your job before using it on anything you care about.
Go, standard library only — no external dependencies.
Status
Partially implemented. Roughly 8,800 lines of tested code. Every phase
except staging now exists as a package, including cutover, but nothing wires
them into a production run yet, so run still refuses.
| 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 |
Refuses on purpose — see below |
stalwart-migrate status <id> |
Works |
stalwart-migrate report <id> |
Not implemented |
run deliberately refuses to proceed. Cutover (ARCHITECTURE.md §4.5) is
implemented, but nothing calls it: the staging phase (§4.3) and the pipeline
that would run preflight → backup → stage → recovery-mode → cutover →
validate against real paths don't exist yet. run stops rather than going
partway. That refusal is the correct behaviour today, not a bug.
Start with rehearse instead. It is read-only, needs no maintenance
window, and answers the question that actually shapes a migration plan —
see below.
Package state:
| Package | Lines | Tests |
|---|---|---|
internal/backup |
1806 | yes |
internal/preflight |
1329 | yes |
internal/stalwartapi |
1276 | yes |
internal/cutover |
1186 | yes |
internal/validate |
792 | yes |
internal/recovery |
702 | yes |
internal/checkpoint |
556 | yes |
internal/service |
467 | yes |
internal/plan |
195 | yes |
internal/config |
stub | — |
Why not a shell script
Stalwart's 0.15 → 0.16 boundary is not a drop-in binary swap: settings move, and the data directory has to be migrated rather than merely copied. The failure mode that matters is a half-migrated mail store with no way back — which is why backup verification and checkpointing are the design centre rather than conveniences bolted on afterwards — and why the tool refuses to cut over until you confirm you have a way back.
ARCHITECTURE.md covers this in full: §1 on why a thin
wrapper is insufficient, §4 on the migration phases, §5 on the checkpoint
state machine, §6 on the CLI surface, and §8 on what is still open.
Build and test
go build ./...
go test ./...
Requires Go 1.26 or newer.
Trying it safely
preflight is the sensible starting point — its checks against the Stalwart
installation are read-only:
sudo go run ./cmd/stalwart-migrate preflight
It still needs write access, because it records the run as a checkpoint before doing anything else:
create run: checkpoint: create run directory:
mkdir /var/lib/stalwart-migrator: permission denied
That path is checkpoint.DefaultBaseDir, a compile-time constant with no
flag or environment override — so preflight needs either root or a
pre-created writable /var/lib/stalwart-migrator. (run takes --work-dir
for its scratch space, but that is a different directory and does not move
the checkpoint store.)
rehearse is the next step, and unlike everything else here it is worth
running today — see the next section.
Rehearse before you migrate
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.
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). Review it, then apply
it after export.json:
stalwart-cli apply --file <state-dir>/runs/<run-id>/supplement.json \
--url https://mail.example.com
Expect the worklist to be long. Measured against a real production instance,
migrate_v016.py carried 219 of 12,401 settings — 1.8%. The rest,
including server.listener, has to be rebuilt by hand; until it is, a
migrated instance answers on no ports at all. Both outputs are preserved
under <state-dir>/runs/<run-id>/ (export.json and unmigrated.txt) even
though the rest of the scratch directory is cleaned up, because they are the
conclusions.
This 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 §4.9 has the reasoning.
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. 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.
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 does 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. - The settings and principals dumps taken during backup stay on disk.
- 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.
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 §4.8 records the full reasoning.
License
Copyright (C) 2026 LINUXexpert-org
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
The full text is in LICENSE. No third-party code is vendored —
this tool is standard library only, and the migrate_v016.py it downloads
at runtime is Stalwart's own script, fetched rather than redistributed.