How to migrate phoenixd to another machine

I’d like to start off by saying that phoenixd has been a great experience so far. The install (on a Linux machine) was as easy as depicted on their website.

And the channel I opened via auto liquidity was super simple. I didn’t have to pick an LSP and I won’t need to manage liquidity.

Unfortunately, the machine I installed the software on started to freeze seconds after every boot. After posting about it here and getting an answer from @DarthCoin, I was surprised at how easy the migration seemed.

It really was just a matter of restoring the seed words on another phoenixd instance. Of course, making sure that the two instances don’t run at the same time.

As easy as it was, I wanted to create this post to give a quick overview for those who might be less tech savvy.

Step 1

Grab seed words from the seed.dat file in hidden.phoenix folder on the old machine.

Step 2

Install phoenixd on the new machine

$ wget https://github.com/ACINQ/phoenixd/releases/download/v0.4.2/phoenix-0.4.2-linux-x64.zip
$ unzip -j phoenix-0.4.2-linux-x64.zip

$ # run the daemon: that's it!
$ ./phoenixd

Step 3

(This is the step that wasn’t super clear and why I wanted to spell it out in this post)

In order to install the software, ./phoenixd has to be run. This is going to generate a new seed phrase.

Now, all you need to do is replace the seed words in seed.dat with the ones from the original install.

In retrospect, I think you can replace the seed words right after unzipping the zip file and before running ./phoenixd. That will probably achieve the same result.

Step 4

Once the seed words have been restored. Just run ./phoenixd again and it’ll start up like nothing happened.

Literally.

There was no indication whatsoever that something had changed, so I ran ./phoenix-cli getinfo and, voila, there was my 2M-sat channel.

It was quite magical.

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/829411