A collection of Python scripts which can be used to import and export sites and users from Alfresco Share.

The package is intended to help set up demonstration environments quickly, reliably and consistently. The scripts are not suitable for importing or exporting large volumes of content or for any general production use such as system backups.

Requirements

The scripts work with fully with versions 3.3, 3.4 and 4.0 of Alfresco, with additional limited support for previous versions of 3.x. No additional customisations are needed in Alfresco or Share, so you can export data from existing systems without any fuss.

Python 2.6+ (http://www.python.org/) is required to run the scripts, with Python 2.7 recommended for packaging site bootstrap packages. At present Python 3.x is not supported.

What can be imported/exported?

For sites

• Site configurations
• Site members (users only at present)
• Site dashboards, including dashlet configuration
• All content held within the site
• Records Management sites (must have RM installed)
• Web Quick Start sites (must have WQS installed)
• Document categories and tags (specify --export-tags and --import-tags)

For users

• All profile information, including profile images
• User dashboard configurations
• User preferences
• User groups and group memberships

What is not imported/exported?

• User passwords (passwords are set to the same value as the username by default, since they cannot be exported)
• Account enabled flags (all accounts enabled)
• Activity feed entries
• File system-level customisations (e.g. custom dashlets) and configuration

How does it work?

The scripts mimic a web browser logging into the Share web application, then invoke a number of mostly JSON-based web scripts to read and write data to and from the application. JSON is also used as the format for storing exported metadata and user information, since it is well-structured, human readable and lightweight. Python has strong support for JSON data via the json module. ACP format is used to package up site content.

Download and Usage

Download and extract share-import-export-1.3.4.zip (54MB, smaller packages without the sample data are available from the Downloads page).

To quickly create the Company Rebranding site, open a command prompt and run the following in the directory you've just extracted the files to.

import-site.py data/sites/branding.json --create-missing-members --users-file=data/cloud-users.json

For more site definitions you can choose between the files images.json, usersgroup2010.json, exec1.json and rm.json.

After importing the site(s) you should see them listed when you log in to Alfresco Share as Paul Hampton (phampton/phampton).

See README.txt for detailed information on running the tools, or use the --help option with any of the scripts for information on the different parameters accepted.

Contributing

You can help by testing the scripts against your own test data and posting feedback in the Issues section.

You are welcome to redistribute the tools under an Apache 2.0 license and encouraged to submit any enhancements you make.