Recently, Parse announced they’d be retiring their service entirely on January 28th, 2017. While this comes as a bit of a shock to their own customers and the community as a whole, they’re working to ensure that the transition off their platform is a simple process. We at ObjectRocket are doing the same to help any customer find a good home for their MongoDB data! In this post I’ll outline how easy it is to move over to the ObjectRocket family and how we can help. Let’s jump right in.
ObjectRocket Steps
The first thing you’ll need to do is signup for an ObjectRocket account if you don’t currently have one.
Once logged into the ObjectRocket control panel, you’ll need to add payment information to begin. Once payment information has been added you can start creating an instance. This will be a MongoDB replica set specifically created to handle Parse workloads, so you don’t need to worry about anything other than the name and size.
You should see your instance listed in the control panel at this point, so we’ll click on the name and that’ll take us to the details page.
Normally the first step is to add an ACL allowing access to the instance, but we’ve gone ahead and whitelisted the Parse IP’s to make things a bit easier. What we need to do next is create a database and a database user. Click the ‘Databases’ header below, as shown in the screenshot.
Now click the ‘Add Database’ button. There are three fields to fill out, the database name, username, and password for the user.
Now that you’ve created a database you’re good to go! Let’s take the Connect String from the Connect header, it should look something like this: 066a9436cc86483b9027c5a50712e9f8/iad1-c19-0.mongo.objectrocket.com:51139,iad1-c19-1.mongo.objectrocket.com:51139,iad1-c19-2.mongo.objectrocket.com:51139. The Parse migration tool needs the string to be in the Connection String URI Format, which is defined as:
mongodb://[username:password@]host1[:port1][,host2[:port2],...[,hostN[:portN]]][/[database][?options]]
In the end, your connection string should look like this:
mongodb://parse:<password>@iad1-c19-1.mongo.objectrocket.com:51139,iad1-c19-0.mongo.objectrocket.com:51139,iad1-c19-2.mongo.objectrocket.com:51139/parseMigration?ssl=true
Be sure to specify the option ?ssl=true after the database name to tell the Parse migration to securely connect to your ObjectRocket MongoDB Replica Set, otherwise you may receive security warnings when migrating your app.
Parse Steps
Now that you have a working MongoDB instance you’re ready to set things up on Parse’s end. First let’s make sure you’re using the new dashboard. If your URL shows www.parse.com/apps, this means you’re using the original dashboard. You should see a large blue button on the lower left of your screen which says “Switch to the new Dashboard”, which you should go ahead and click. This will take you to the new URL of dashboard.parse.com/apps. The screenshot below shows what the dashboard should look like.
Now that you’re at the new dashboard, let’s click on the name of the app you’d like to migrate, and then choose ‘App Settings’ on the right side.
ow all that’s left is to click the “Migrate” button near the bottom of the page.
This brings up the section to enter the connect string.
Let’s copy in the MongoDB URI we made earlier: mongodb://:@iad1-c19-1.mongo.objectrocket.com:51137,iad1-c19-0.mongo.objectrocket.com:51138,iad1-c19-2.mongo.objectrocket.com:51139/?ssl=true, and click the ‘Begin the Migration’ button to finish. If you receive a warning that states “We strongly suggest you enable SSL on your database and use the URL option ‘ssl=true’.”, be sure to append the option ?ssl=true to the end of your connection string before migrating.
That’s it! You’ve finished migrating your MongoDB data over to ObjectRocket as soon as the confirmation window appears. From here you can carry on as normal, but if you’d like any help or assistance optimizing your database you can reach us here. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need anything at all, as we’re always around. Thank you for choosing ObjectRocket!
