Perform content migrations with Kontent.ai CLI

The building blocks of content migration

Whenever you want to migrate your content, you need to deal with three things:

1. Source – defines the data you want to migrate. For example, this can be content in an old CMS, CRM, spreadsheet, or even in a CSV file.
2. Destination – defines where you want to put the source data. This is Kontent.ai.
3. Adapter – transforms and maps the data between the source and the destination, and imports it to the destination. This is what Kontent.ai CLI helps with.

Explore the CLI migration samples

In the video, Jake Kula, our Presales Engineer, shows you how to use the migrations boilerplate for Kontent.ai CLI to run a series of content migrations. This approach works well for content migrations within an existing Kontent.ai project as well as for importing content from external resources such as databases, other CMSs, spreadsheets, or CSV files. You can also use the same approach to import and export content for your backups. The boilerplate comes with migration scripts built around the example of making a content model change and updating the affected content items. You’ll see Jake go through these steps:

1. Create a content type for blog posts
2. Create a blog post content item.
3. Create a content type for authors.
4. Add a linked items element to the content type of articles.
5. Perform content migration to extract the names of article authors, create a content item for each name, and link the content item in respective articles.
6. Remove the text element for author names that are not needed anymore.

Create migration scripts that suit your use case