Migrate your setup

You do not rebuild your automation by hand. SwitchTender reads an AWX, Semaphore, Chef, Puppet, Rundeck, or Jenkins export, a Rundeck project archive, or a plain crontab, and creates the equivalent objects in one pass.

The five sources do not carry the same things. AWX and Semaphore export a whole control plane, so they bring projects, inventories, credential shells, templates, surveys, and schedules. Jenkins exports jobs and nothing else, so it brings templates, surveys, and schedules against an inventory you name. Rundeck brings those same three, plus one project when you hand it a project archive whose source control configuration names a repository this can reach. Neither Rundeck artifact brings an inventory. A crontab brings schedules alone. The table is in what each source brings over.

From the UI

1. Export from your current tool. awx export produces a JSON document. Semaphore has no single export command, so gather the project's repositories, inventories, keys, templates, and schedules from its API into one JSON document. Rundeck exports a project's jobs as YAML or JSON, or a whole project as an archive from Project Settings; either one uploads and the importer tells them apart by content. Jenkins has no export file at all, so zip its jobs directory and upload that.
2. Open Migrate from the top of the overview, or go to /ui/migrate.
3. Choose the format: AWX, Semaphore, Chef, Puppet, Rundeck, or Jenkins. Rundeck and Jenkins ask for the inventory their templates should target, since neither names hosts of its own.
4. Paste the export, or choose the file, and select Preview. Nothing is written yet. You get a report of exactly what would be created, with every warning.
5. Select Import to apply it.

A crontab imports from the command line only. The Migrate page and the /v1/import/{format} endpoint take the other four.

Both cap an upload at 25 MiB and answer a larger one with 413. The command line applies no such cap, so a Rundeck project archive from a busy project, which carries every execution log alongside the definitions the importer reads, may need switchtender import rundeck rather than the page.

From the CLI

switchtender import awx awx-export.json --db switchtender.db            # preview
switchtender import awx awx-export.json --db switchtender.db --apply    # write

import semaphore reads a Semaphore export the same way. import rundeck jobs.yaml or import rundeck project-archive.zip, import jenkins /var/jenkins_home, and import cron /etc/crontab --system each take --inventory <name>, since none of those three names hosts of its own. A cron line imports as a shell step, and a shell step runs on the SwitchTender host rather than on the machine the crontab came from, so naming an inventory does not move it; the report says so on every cron import. Preview first, always. --apply is the only step that writes.

Finish by setting secrets

Exports never contain secret values, so an AWX or Semaphore credential arrives as a named shell. The report lists which ones need a secret. Fill them in once with set a secret, and everything else is already in place.

A Rundeck, Jenkins, or crontab import creates no credentials at all, because those exports hold none. A job that needed a login needs a credential built by hand and attached to its template afterward. A secure Rundeck option or a Jenkins password parameter is refused rather than imported as a survey field, and the report names each one, because a survey answer is stored in plain text on every run.

A Rundeck import needs an inventory attached by hand for the same reason. A job export names no host, and a project archive carries the configuration of where Rundeck fetched its nodes from and not one node definition, so the report names each node source by kind and location for you to build the inventory from rather than guessing at a list of machines.

The full field-by-field mapping and its current limits are in the migration guide.