Exporting/Importing from a Development Environment to Production Environment

In this scenario, you use a development environment to create configurations (and possibly also personalizations) and then export those to the production environment. You must take care in this process to preserve the existing configurations.

  1. Create a backup of your production configurations. In your production environment, use the Export option in the Configuration Console or use the Configuration Data Export utility.

    Administration Console > Configuration and Personalization > Configuration > Export Configurations

    or at the command line in the production environment, run one of the following commands:

    cdexport -z fileName.zip prodline

    cdexport -o outputDirectory prodline

  2. If you also want to work with personalizations, create a backup. Use the Configuration Data Export utility.

    Administration Console > Configuration and Personalization > Personalization > Export Personalizations

  3. In the development environment, run Verify Configurations (cdverify) to ensure that the configurations you want to export are valid in the current environment.
  4. In the development environment, export the configurations you want to later import to production. Use the Configuration Data Export utility.

    Administration Console > Configuration and Personalization > Configuration > Export Configurations

    Administration Console > Configuration and Personalization > Configuration > Export Personalizations

    or at the command line in the development environment, type

    cdexport -z fileName.zip [Options] prodline [ExportActor [=ImportActor]]

    For more information on cdexport syntax, see scexport - Security Class Export.

  5. Import the file from the development environment. Run Configuration Data Import.

    Administration Console > Configuration and Personalization > Import Configurations and Personalizations

    or at the command line in the production environment, type

    cdimport -I fileName.zip --keepactor prodline

    When you run the cdimport command, be sure to use the --keepactor option. Without this option, the system deletes all actor related data before doing the import. Since there is a global actor associated with configurations, this means all application and security configurations are deleted before any data is imported. If you accidentally delete the configurations, use the backup file created in step 1 to recover the production configurations.

    If you want to override any duplicate records on the import, use the -o parameter.

  6. If you run cdimport from the command line, after the import is complete, run cdverify in the production environment to check that the configurations are valid.