migration-service

What is migration-service and what is it for?

migration-service is a set of off-chain programs that help a Holochain app carry a participant's committed history from an older version of its application rules to a newer one. It lets the app fetch that participant's sealed closing record over HTTP, so the app can open on the successor version instead of an operator having to drive that step by hand.

The project is an off-chain pipeline for moving a participant's committed history from a closing version of a Holochain app to its successor. When an app version is retired, the participant's chain is sealed with a closing summary that several notaries have signed; migration-service carries that sealed package from the old network to the new one so the participant's own history comes along. It is maintained in the unytco organisation, alongside that organisation's peer-to-peer payments and accounting tools.

The service has three parts. A router is the public HTTP entry point: it checks that the move is a legitimate step along a version chain and returns the closing package to the app, holding no keys and never reading what the package contains. Beside an older network that is still running, a daemon reads that network's committed closes — it signs only its own calls through the node it runs next to, and has no way to sign on anyone else's behalf. A third program does the same work headlessly for agents running on servers rather than on a person's computer.

A concrete example is an operator running such a server-side agent: they download the released binaries and run them as supervised services, one on the old host to close the chain and one on the new host to open it, checking each step with the status and verify commands. The repository README documents the three components, how to build and test each, and the release file names.

From 3 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.