Best practices for migrating multiple Apache webs to new server?

[rotech1]

Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. https://crt.sh/?q=example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is: train.rotech.ca plus multiple others

I ran this command: N/A

It produced this output: N/A

My web server is (include version): Apache 2.2.15 (old) and Apache 2.4.6 (new)

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Centos6 ( old) and Centos7 ( new)

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: N/A

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know): yes

I’m using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel): no

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you’re using Certbot):
certbot 0.40.1 (old)
certbot 0.40.1 (new)

Migrating to new hardware, as the old CentOS 6 OS is going out of support. I have already migrated a couple of our ‘static’ sites by just waiting till DNS made the new hardware reachable for certbot to http-authenticate, then getting new certs manually.

I also have a few live database-driven sites, so with those ones I cannot just let both old and new servers accept hits as DNS propagates. I will have to set a maintenance window ( downtime!) and want to be able to minimize as much as possible.

I have searched the docs but haven’t found a current ‘best practice’ for migrations of this sort…

[JuergenAuer]

Hi @rotech1

there is no downtime required.

You can use the same certificate with both servers - new and old. Simple copy & paste. Then install the certificate manual.

Perhaps renew the certificate on your old server. So you have a new certificate and 90 days to install Certbot.

[rg305]

@rotech1

I will have to set a maintenance window ( downtime!) and want to be able to minimize as much as possible.

Unless you can allow "read-only" access to your current site/database while you sync/copy to the new system, there will be hard downtime
You could put up a "We are working hard upgrading our systems..." message [even on another temp web server] with expected outage info, etc. during the outage.

In a perfect world, the databases could be fully synced before the move and it would be completely seemless to the customer.