Hey there,
We have two distinct Octopus servers: One in our development / QA space, and one in our Production space. These are isolated from one another for a variety of reasons (security, redundancy, separation of concerns).
This poses a difficult situation in that if we build a project in our Dev Octopus server, we then have to build the exact same project in our Prod server. As a manual task, this is laborious and error-prone.
Is there a way to copy a project from one Octopus server and build it up on another Octopus server via the API or the CLR?
Cheers
Hi Chris,
Thanks for getting in touch! This is a pretty common scenario. We have a couple of tools that can help here, one which I would recommend over the other.
Our Migrator tool allows for you to take a full or partial export of an Octopus server to import into another. We extended this feature to allow for a partial export for projects only.
It dumps all the information in JSON files which means you can script the process, but also if you don’t need all the information you can delete files or directories and they will not be included in the import.
I recommend the migrator tool as it will match on names, and also does not require all data to be imported to work.
The other tool which does a similar job is our octo.exe export|import. It however requires prerequisite information to already exist and use the same IDs across both systems. This can be preferable when you want to make sure that only DEV can make projects. It is much more rigid however.
Either tool will work, it will depend on your needs, and preferred management.
For better news we are making progress on a new feature that will make this much easier to promote releases between different Octopus instances. Very soon we will have an RFC on the blog regarding this feature which is currently named Promotions but may be changed to Zones. Either way keep an eye on the blog. It will make your life even easier when it is implemented 
Please let me know if you have any questions or if I can expand on any of this information.
Vanessa
Vanessa,
Oh you are a lifesaver!!! Thank you so so much. This is exactly what we were looking for, and along you come, like a magician, and make our dream come true.
This is perfect.
Thanks so much
Chris
Hi Chris,
I wish all the responses to the answers I send were this happy
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions or issues.
Vanessa
Hey, it’s often a thankless job, helping nerds. They can be really nitpicky and yeah, grumpy.
Oh well. You definitely gave us the very answer we needed.
cheers
Chris
Hi Chris,
I just wanted to give you an update that the Remote Release Promotions RFC is up on the blog if you haven’t seen it yet: https://octopus.com/blog/remote-release-promotions-rfc
We would really appreciate any comments that you have regarding the design and concept.
Cheers!
Vanessa
Vanessa,
Wow, that is what my company and I are after. We love it. Our only question is when will it be available for early testing? We would be interested in being involved.
Thank you so much!
Chris
Hi Chris,
I can add you to the list if we have an open beta. At this stage it looks like it will be completed around the end of the year. We are hoping for it to be sooner but it is locked behind a few other features that need to be completed first.
Vanessa
We would love that, Vanessa.
Yeah, I get the locked behind other features thing. We are in the mad dash to migrate a large swathe of our platform off Entity Framework on to Dapper, but it can’t go forward because of…you know. This, that the other thing. Whenever the beta is available, we would love to be a part of the testing program.
Thank you so much.
Cheers