I’m planning to migrate a Drupal 7 site to Ruby on Rails 6. The Drupal site is very media heavy. 100K+ nodes (pages) all with images and videos. There are also many categories and users. One complication is that the Drupal database is MySQL and the Rails dabase will be Postgresql.
I was thinking to create a json feed from the Drupal site and then import and re-create the content in Rails. Am I overthinking this? Should I rather import the content directly from the database?
What are my options for migration? Are there any best practices for such jobs?
There are going to be many challenging aspects of this, from actually creating the rails app, to getting the data migrated.
I don’t think whether you are using a json feed or a importing directly from the db is going to be your biggest issue.
I would start out by creating the app in Rails in the first place; that’s going to be a big challenge on it’s own, and you can’t import to an app you don’t have yet!
At least the basic skeleton of the app. Then you can look at importing data to it, and I would do, at least at the start whatever is simplest. Get started, see where you run into troubles.
This is going to be a big project, whether you use a json feed or connect directly to the db won’t be the biggest concern. You won’t know the biggest concerns until you get started on it.
Building the Rails app will probably be not a problem. I have built a similar one recently, so I have good recent experience.
In the past I have managed to import information into a Rails site from a Drupal site using a basic json file, which is why I was thinking to take that path again. But I’m uncertain if it’s the most efficient way to do things. I don’t really want to work in Drupal creating complex json feeds that cover all the content, unless there is no better way. On the other hand I also don’t think doing a direct import from MySQL is easy at all, because Drupal’s database structure is not simple, especially when a site uses the ‘fields’ module, which is similar to Active Storage in Rails, in a sense that one table contains multiple field data.
@iraszl You could use pgloader to transform your Mysql to PG. If your media files are on any static asset server like s3 there should not be any problem. If they are not, consider moving them to any asset server and give a reference for them on your database.
Before using pgloader please read documentation and be careful about constraints. I think there won’t be any major problem if you did not use views and triggers heavily.
Please do explain why you want to transfer all your content to Rails? There may be other ways to skin this cat - generally I am against rewrites of this nature: unless there are very very cogent reasons for doing so, I would probably stick with Drupal.
and as Jonathan Rochkind has alluded to - there will likely be hidden snags along the way.
Secondly, why are you wanting to transfer from MySQL to Postgres? MySQL is certainly a robust enough solution. Basecamp are very comfortable with a MySQL stack, the benefit from switching is marginal at best - unless of course you have very cogent reasons for doing so.
