Possible Approaches

• Writing a JSON API to manage Heimdall
• Export/Import a list of items on a per-user basis
• Backup/Restore state of entire application

Choice: backup/restore user, settings, and items state.

• Covers both advanced, declarative use-case and less technical users with same code.

Spec

Backup / Restore should include:

• All users
• Each user's settings
• each user's items (tags and application bookmarks)
• All the user-generated images referenced by a setting or item. We should not back up built-in images from (eg) a supported app.

Backup and restore should be resilient to changes in Heimdall's schema, but shouldn't block evolution of Heimdall. It's a best-effort process.

• Include Heimdall version number in the backup so we can warn if version differs between the backup file and this version of Heimdall
• The process should not attempt to deal with changes to supported apps. If an app is no longer supported, bummer, but whatever. We drop the class/app_id and move on

User story: technical user wants to automate configuring Heimdall

• Trigger a restore from a config management tool like Ansible, Chef, etc.
• Could be a CLI tool or a location designated in a env variable.

User story: a tutorial user wants to restore Heimdall after switching machines

• Prefers a web UI to a CLI or filesystem shenanigans
• easy to upload or download a backup file.

Nice-to-haves

Consider these for future improvements: