# Registrar Data Migration There is an existing registrar/registry at Verisign. They will provide us with an export of the data from that system. The goal of our data migration is to take the provided data and use it to create as much as possible a _matching_ state in our registrar. There is no way to make our registrar _identical_ to the Verisign system because we have a different data model and workflow model. Instead, we should focus our migration efforts on creating a state in our new registrar that will primarily allow users of the system to perform the tasks that they want to do. ## Users One of the major differences with the existing registrar/registry is that our system uses Login.gov for authentication. Any person with an identity-verified Login.gov account can make an account on the new registrar, and the first time that person logs in through Login.gov, we make a corresponding account in our user table. Because we cannot know the Universal Unique ID (UUID) for a person's Login.gov account, we cannot pre-create user accounts for individuals in our new registrar based on the data from Verisign. ## Domains Our registrar keeps track of domains. The authoritative source for domain information is the registry, but the registrar needs a copy of that information to make connections between registry users and the domains that they manage. The registrar stores very few fields about a domain except for its name, so it could be straightforward to import the exported list of domains from Verisign's `escrow_domains.daily.dotgov.GOV.txt`. It doesn't appear that that table stores a flag for active or inactive, so every domain in the file can be imported into our system as `is_active=True`. An example Django management command that can load the delimited text file from the daily escrow is in `src/registrar/management/commands/load_domains_data.py`. It uses Django's object-relational modeler (ORM) to create Django objects for the domains and then write them to the database in a single bulk operation. To run the command locally for testing, using Docker Compose: ```shell docker compose run -T app ./manage.py load_domains_data < /tmp/escrow_domains.daily.dotgov.GOV.txt ``` ## User access to domains The Verisign data contains a `escrow_domain_contacts.daily.dotgov.txt` file that links each domain to three different types of contacts: `billing`, `tech`, and `admin`. The ID of the contact in this linking table corresponds to the ID of a contact in the `escrow_contacts.daily.dotgov.txt` file. In the contacts file is an email address for each contact. The new registrar associates user accounts (authenticated with Login.gov) with domains using a `UserDomainRole` linking table. New users can be granted roles on domains by creating a `DomainInvitation` that links an email address with a domain. When a new user finishes authenticating with Login.gov and their email address matches an invitation, then they are given the appropriate role on the invitation's domain. For the purposes of migration, we can prime the invitation system by creating an invitation in the system for each email address listed in the `domain_contacts` file. This means that if a person is currently a user in the Verisign system, and they use the same email address with Login.gov, then they will end up with access to the same domains in the new registrar that they were associated with in the Verisign system. A management command that does this needs to process two data files, one for the contact information and one for the domain/contact association, so we can't use stdin the way that we did before. Instead, we can use the fact that Docker Compose mounts the `src/` directory inside of the container at `/app`. Then, data files that are inside of the `src/` directory can be accessed inside the Docker container. An example script using this technique is in `src/registrar/management/commands/load_domain_invitations.py`. ```shell docker compose run app ./manage.py load_domain_invitations /app/escrow_domain_contacts.daily.dotgov.GOV.txt /app/escrow_contacts.daily.dotgov.GOV.txt ```