I have 2 apache nifi servers that are development and production hosted on AWS, currently the migration between development and production is done manually. I would like to know if it is possible to automate this process and ensure that people do not develop in production?
I thought about uploading the entire nifi in github and having it deploy the new nifi on the production server, but I don't know if that would be correct to do.
One option is to use NiFi registry, store the flows in the registry and share the registry between Development and Production environments. You can then promote the latest version of the flow from dev to prod.
As you say, another option is to potentially use Git to share the flow.xml.gz between environments and using a deploy script. The flow.xml.gz stores the data flow configuration/canvas. You can use parameterized flows (https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/user-guide.html#Parameters) to point NiFi at different external dev/prod services (eg. NiFi dev processor uses a dev database URL, NiFi prod points to prod database URL).
One more option is to export all or part of the NiFi flow as a template, and upload the template to your production NiFi, however registry is probably a better way of handling this. More info on templates here: https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/user-guide.html#templates.
I believe the original design plan behind NiFi was not necessarily to have different environments, and to allow live changes in production. I guess you would build your initial data flow using some test data in production and then once it's ready start the live data flow. But I think it's reasonable to want to have separate environments.