How to migrate vaultwarden

Daniel Garcia
tech
February 23, 2024

Background

I’ve recently updated my Vaultwarden instance in my home lab and wanted yo migrate all the previous data.

Yes, you can export the vault from the UI, but I had several users and don’t have access to their accounts, so I needed another way to migrate everything to the new instance.

For context, I run Vaultwarden in an Ubuntu LXC in my Proxmox server. I used tteck’s awesome scripts to install it.

Here’s how to migrate your Vaultwarden data

1. Backup the original data

  1. SSH into wherever you have Vaultwarden installed
  2. Locate the data directory. Depending on your Vaultwarden version, the data folder can either be in:
    • /opt/vaultwarden/data
    • /var/lib/vaultwarden/data
  3. Copy all the contents inside of data to a safe directory. I copied them to my local machine using scp.

2. Migrate the data to a new Vaultwarden instance

  1. Install the new Vaultwarden instance
  2. Stop Vaultwarden
systemctl stop vaultwarden
  1. Remove the default data dir
sudo rm -r /opt/vaultwarden/data
  1. Copy the current data over (I used SCP but you can use any file transfer system you like)
  2. Remove the old RSA keys from the data directory. These will be recreated
sudo rm /opt/vaultwarden/data/rsa_key.pem
sudo rm /opt/vaultwarden/data/rsa_key.pub.pem
  1. Change the directory ownership to vaultwarden
sudo chown -R vaultwarden:vaultwarden /opt/vaultwarden/data
  1. Restart Vaultwarden
sudo systemctl start vaultwarden

Done!

You should now be able to reach Vaultwarden at the endpoint you’ve set it up and have all of your old data.