Best way to move an app to a different shell user

Nis

What's the best way to move an app from one shell user to another?

If it's just a few files, it's of course simple enough to just use ftp to download and then upload them again. But for something like Nextcloud with a bazillion small files and whatever is synced, that can be impractical.

One option would be rsync or sftp which aren't too bad, but can still take a long time (several hours when I pulled Nextcloud from WF).

Is it possible to mv everything without messing up permissions?

sean

You could grant access via the ACL and then (as the second user) rsync the files over into the new app all locally on the server, eg:

 rsync -Pa /home/user1/apps/appname/ /home/user2/apps/appname

Once that's done and you've verified that everything is working you can then delete the original app.

andywar65

sean I tried this procedure but when doing rsync I get the following error (values in <> are not the actual ones):

rsync: mkdir "/home/<UserB>/apps/<myapp>" failed: Permission denied (13) rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at main.c(657) [Receiver=3.1.2]
This was the granting procedure:
setfacl -m u:userB:--x $HOME setfacl -R -m u:userB:rwx $HOME/apps/myapp setfacl -R -m d:u:userB:rwx $HOME/apps/myapp setfacl -R -m d:u:userA:rwx $HOME/apps/myapp chmod g+s $HOME/apps/myapp
Thanks in advance

ttavoy

Or just do sftp in the cloud?

To move Myapp from Myuser1 to Myuser2, I log in to Myuser2 and do:

cd apps/Myapp
sftp Myuser1@opalx.opalstack.com and give password when prompted
cd apps/Myapp
mget -r *
bye

Seems to work fine, or is this too simple?

sean

ttavoy If you'd prefer to do it that way then sure 🙂

Nis

ttavoy I did mention that. But depending on what you're moving, it can take a very long time. Several hours in the case of Nextcloud, purely due to the large number of small files.

ttavoy

Nis Hi, sorry I wasn't clear enough. You mentioned "use ftp to download and then upload them again" by which I think you mean using an intermediate machine as a stepping stone. What I'm suggesting is different, which is to run sftp in the cloud

If you log in to the shell account which you want to move the app to, you will find that it has sftp installed.

Using sftp on the server as a means of copying the files from one user account to another means no downloading and no uploading, everything happens on the one server.

Even for a bazillion files it should be relatively instantaneous. (And of course you can speed it up to sub-instantaneous by doing gzip and tar first).

aa11

ttavoy Even for a bazillion files it should be relatively instantaneous. (And of course you can speed it up to sub-instantaneous by doing gzip and tar first).

I was thinking this too.

I did a little research into it and you can even "pipe tar across an ssh session", if your source disk isn't big enough to hold the original files and the .tar file.

Here's some great information I found:

@sean Any thoughts on these methods? (Whenever you're not too busy)

sean

aa11 my go-to tool for transfers is rsync which can do over-the-wire compression natively through zlib. It's probably not as fast as scp+tar in a benchmark but my own connection is pretty slow so I rarely notice differences like that.

Please use whatever works best for for you 🙂

sean

andywar65 you have to create the new app "myapp" for userB prior to running the setfacl commands.

andywar65

sean Thank you!!!