stalwart-migrator/README.md

# 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](#recovery-is-your-job) before using it on anything you care about.

Go, standard library only — no external dependencies.

## Status

Roughly 14,600 lines of Go, stdlib only, of which about 6,300 are tests.
Every phase exists as a package, and on **2026-08-25 this tool migrated a
production mail 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.

That run was preceded by a full dress rehearsal on a clone of the same
server, which is the single practice worth copying from this project: it
found four faults that would each have reached production, three of which
only appear against a real instance. See [Rehearse on a clone
first](#rehearse-on-a-clone-first).

| 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` |
| `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` performs the migration**, in the 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.

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.

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. `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.

Package state:

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 | — |

## Before you start: two things you must fix on the server

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.

1. **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, and you must resolve it in v0.15 first — give each tenant its own
   domains, move the accounts into one tenant, or remove the tenants
   entirely.

2. **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. See [You need a named admin
   account](#you-need-a-named-admin-account-before-you-migrate).

## 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`](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

```sh
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:

```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:

```
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

```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.

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`:

```sh
stalwart-cli apply --file <state-dir>/runs/<run-id>/supplement.json \
    --url https://mail.example.com
```

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. 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.

## 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 that rehearsal caught, none of which the mock could express: 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; and `tenant-admin` roles the converter does
not restore.

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.

## 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. Note that `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.

## 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. Three separate reasons, all 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 will refuse 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`.

## 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`](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.