Tools to work with environments
Working with environments often means more than just creating or cloning them. Whether you’re syncing content, cleaning up after testing, or preparing for production, having the right tools makes all the difference. This lesson introduces two key tools that help you manage environments effectively: Migration toolkit and data-ops.
What is migration toolkit?
The Migration toolkit
is a command-line interface (CLI) tool for migrating content and its structure into your Kontent.ai environments. It’s especially useful when you’re migrating from external systems or setting up new projects with predefined content models in Kontent.ai.
The toolkit is ideal for initial project setup or bulk migrations. With Migration toolkit, you can:
- Migrate entities: Import content types, taxonomies, and content items.
- Migrate content: Move content items, assets, and linked items between projects and environments.
- Transform data: Map and convert data from external sources.
- Automate: Handle large-scale content imports efficiently.
What is data-ops?
The data-ops tool is a set of command-line operations for managing content and content models across environments. Data-ops is useful to maintain consistency and stability across environments as they evolve.
Unlike the Migration toolkit, data-ops is designed for ongoing environment management. With data-ops, you can:
- Sync entities: Synchronize entities such as content types, workflows, taxonomies, asset folders, collections, spaces, languages, preview, and workflows between environments.
- Migrate content: Migrate selected content items or assets between environments.
- Backup & restore: Save and reload environment states into empty environments.
- Clean environments: Delete all or selected entities in your environments.
- Automate: Create migration scripts for automation.
What you’ll need to get started
Both data-ops and the Migration toolkit are tools for working with Kontent.ai. While they share some setup requirements, each has its own CLI package that can be installed either locally or globally. Prerequisites:- Node.js (LTS version).
- Data-ops and Migration toolkit installation information.
- Kontent.ai project with appropriate permissions.
- Environment IDs for both source and target environments.
- Management API key with sufficient access.
- Basic understanding of your content model and environment.
When to use the migration toolkit vs. data-ops
Use the Migration toolkit when importing content from an external system or starting a new project with a predefined content model. It helps streamline setup by importing the mapped content structure efficiently. Use data-ops when you’re working with existing environments. It’s ideal for syncing content and models, clearing redundant content, creating backups, or storing version-controlled snapshots of changes between environments. The table below details the comparison of Migration toolkit and data-ops to assess based on your needs.| Criteria | Migration toolkit | Data-ops tool |
| Primary purpose
| Facilitates content migration between Kontent.ai environments and from external systems. | Manages environment data operations including backup, restore, sync, and migration in Kontent.ai. |
| Migration scope | Focused on importing/exporting content, especially from external sources. | Supports synchronization, migration scripts, and environment management. |
| Best suited for | Content migrations, especially from external systems, and scenarios requiring custom migration. | Ongoing operations and incremental updates. |
| Ease of use | Powerful but might require more setup and configuration. | Easy-to-use and straightforward CLI tool that offers a broad range of capabilities. |
Where to go from here?
If you want to deepen your understanding of what’s possible using these tools to work with environments, continue following the learning path to build your knowledge step-by-step.If you‘re looking for specific use cases, you can jump directly into any of the following lessons for a more tailored approach to learning:
- Sync across environments using data-ops – useful for keeping environments aligned during development.
- Migrate content to other environments – ideal for moving content and assets between your environments.
- Backup, restore, and clean environments – helpful for disaster recovery, resetting environments, or starting fresh.
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