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HostShift

HostShift Documentation

Move web workloads between Ubuntu and Debian servers without mutating the source host.
Quick StartInstall

HostShift is a Go CLI and Codex skill/plugin project for discovering, planning, moving, and verifying Linux web workloads.

It also ships a stdio MCP server for AI clients such as Claude Desktop. The MCP surface exposes planning, structured review, and dry-run tools only; apply operations stay in the human-operated CLI.

The public documentation site is published at hostshift.karacabay.com.

The core invariant is strict:

The source server is an observation endpoint. HostShift may read facts and stream read-only exports, but it must not write files, install packages, manage services, alter firewall rules, create snapshots, add keys, or place applications into maintenance mode on the source.

What It Covers

Section titled “What It Covers”
  • Ubuntu and Debian platform detection and target package planning
  • Docker Compose applications
  • Standalone Docker containers
  • Bind mount and file-set transfer
  • MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Redis stream migrations
  • Nginx config checks and target reload validation
  • Apache vhost activation and target reload validation
  • Caddy configuration and target reload validation
  • Memcached configuration and target service restart
  • RabbitMQ configuration and target diagnostics; live queues/messages are not migrated
  • Certbot/Let’s Encrypt state preservation with target certificate listing and renewal timer activation when available
  • systemd application service cutover
  • cron file transfer, target cron package planning, and target cron reload
  • PHP-FPM config transfer, target package planning, and target service reload
  • Supervisor config transfer, target package planning, and target reread/update
  • Fail2ban config transfer, target package planning, and target service reload
  • Logrotate config transfer, target package planning, and target config validation
  • Laravel-style database connectivity checks
  • SSH keepalive, MySQL bind-address, UFW, and nftables target configuration
  • Docker matrix and Lima VM validation gates

Use the reference section for exact CLI flags, profile v2 fields, workload/check types, source discovery facts, platform package mappings, action/state JSON, and test matrix behavior.

Current Milestone

Section titled “Current Milestone”

HostShift is preparing its first public v0.3.0 release. The Go CLI is the migration implementation; the earlier Node migration runtime has been removed.