Using NiFi v0.6.1 is there a way to import backups/archives?
And by backups I mean the files that are generated when you call
POST /controller/archive using the REST api or "Controller Settings" (tool bar button) and then "Back-up flow" (link).
I tried unzipping the backup and importing it as a template but that didn't work. But after comparing it to an exported template file, the formats are reasonably different. But perhaps there is a way to transform it into a template?
At the moment my current work around is to not select any components on the top level flow and then select "create template"; which will add a template with all my components. Then I just export that. My issue with this is it's a bit more tricky to automate via the REST API. I used Fiddler to determine what the UI is doing and it first generates a snippet that includes all the components (labels, processors, connections, etc.). Then it calls create template (POST /nifi-api/contorller/templates) using the snippet ID. So the template call is easy enough but generating the definition for the snippet is going to take some work.
Note: Once the following feature request is implemented I'm assuming I would just use that instead:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NIFI/Configuration+Management+of+Flows
The entire flow for a NiFi instance is stored in a file called flow.xml.gz in the conf directory (flow.xml.tar in a cluster). The back-up functionality is essentially taking a snapshot of that file at the given point in time and saving it to the conf/archive directory. At a later point in time you could stop NiFi and replace conf/flow.xml.gz with one of those back-ups to restore the flow to that state.
Templates are a different format from the flow.xml.gz. Templates are more public facing and shareable, and can be used to represent portions of a flow, or the entire flow if no components are selected. Some people have used templates as a model to deploy their flows, essentially organizing their flow into process groups and making template for each group. This project provides some automation to work with templates: https://github.com/aperepel/nifi-api-deploy