Just to add to what James has already stated, templates also have been polished quite a bit to be more deterministic and source control friendly so they are an ideal artifact to be versioned and kept in source control repo.
Cheers Oleg On Sep 14, 2016, at 3:02 PM, James Wing <jvw...@gmail.com<mailto:jvw...@gmail.com>> wrote: Manish, you are absolutely right to back up your flow.xml.gz and conf files. But I would carefully distinguish between using these backups to recreate an equivalent new NiFi, versus attempting to reset the state of your existing NiFi. The difference is the live data in your flow, in the provenance repository, in state variables, etc. Restoring a flow definition that no longer matches your content and provenance data may have unexpected results for you, and for systems connecting with NiFi. NiFi does try hard to handle these changes smoothly, but it isn't a magic time machine. Deploying flow.xml.gz can work, especially when deployed with conf files that reference IDs in the flow (like authorizations.xml), or the nifi.sensitive.props.key setting, etc. But if you overwrite a running flow, you still have the data migration problem. Templates are the current recommended best practice for deployment. As I understand it, templates provide: 1.) Concise packaging for deployment 2.) Separation between site-specific configuration like authorizations from the flow logic 3.) Workflow that allows, encourages, forces the administrator to address migration from the existing flow to incorporate the new template Personally, I think it centers on acceptance or rejection of the command-and-control model, which is controversial and different from most other systems. Templates fit within command-and-control, overwriting flow.xml.gz suggests a different model. I know there are many other opinions on this. Thanks, James On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 1:30 PM, Manish Gupta 8 <mgupt...@sapient.com<mailto:mgupt...@sapient.com>> wrote: Hello Everyone, Is there a best practice for keeping a backup of all the data flows we are developing in NiFi? Currently we take a copy of flow.xml.gz every hour and keep it in backup folder (also in our source control). Also, we keep a copy of all Config files in source control. • We are assuming that using flow.xml.gz and Config files, we will be able to restore the NiFi in case of any failure or if someone makes some mistake. Is this assumption correct? Is there a better way to deal with this? • When we move to production (or some other environment), will it be as simple as dropping flow.xml.gz in a new NiFi installation on NCM along with making some environment related changes? Or, should we use templates on Dev, and import on Prod? Thanks, Manish
