Backup & Migration

Apiman has a feature that allows admin users to export all the configuration data from the Manager into a single export file (JSON formatted). This exported file can then be edited (if necessary) and then imported into another instance of Apiman. This feature attempts to address the following use-cases:

Using the feature is simple - you must log into the Apiman UI as an admin user, then navigate to the "Export/Import" UI page by clicking the "Export/Import Data" link on the API Manager Dashboard. From there you can export or import data.

There are multiple strategies for backing up your Apiman data, depending on the configuration you have chosen (e.g. whether you are using a Database or Elasticsearch to store your data). However, once approach to data backups that is consistent across all configurations is to use the Data Export feature of Apiman to create a JSON file containing all the Apiman configuration data.

This can be done via the UI or via the following API Manager REST endpoint:

Often times you may have a Test version of Apiman deployed, as well as a Production version. Depending on your workflow, you may wish to configure your APIs in the Test environment and then migrate that configuration into Production (rather than having to re-create the same configuration in Production manually). This can be accomplished by Exporting data from Test and then importing it into Production.

When doing this, note that the Export feature will export the entire set of configuration from Apiman. This may be precisely what you want, but many times only a subset of the data is desired. If this is the case, then you will need to edit the resulting JSON file to only include the data you wish to migrate. In the future, we hope to build tools that will make this editing of the exported file easier.

Once you have edited the exported file, you can simply log into your production Apiman instance and use the Export/Import UI page to import the data.

Whenever you wish to upgrade from an old to a newer version of Apiman, you will likely want to preserve all the Plan, API, and Client App configurations you have created.

To do this, you can follow these steps:

Once these steps are complete, you should have a new version of Apiman running with all of your existing data.