Alternatives to Configuration Manager

Overview

The MarkLogic Server Configuration Manager provided a read-only user interface to the MarkLogic Admin UI and could be used for saving and restoring configuration settings. The Configuration Manager tool was deprecated starting with MarkLogic 9.0-5, and is no longer available in MarkLogic 10.

Alternatives

There are a number of alternatives to the Configuration Manager. Most of the options take advantage of the MarkLogic Admin API, either directly or behind the scenes. The following is a list of the most commonly used options:

• Manual Configuration
• ml-gradle
• Configuration Management API

Manual Configuration

For a single environment, the following Knowledge base covers the process of Transporting Resources to a New Cluster.

ml-gradle

For a repeatable process, the most widely used approach is ml-gradle.

A project would be created in Gradle, with the desired configurations. The project can then be used to deploy to any environment - test, prod, qa etc - creating a known configuration that can be maintained under source control, which is a best practice.

Similar to Configuration Manager, ml-gradle also allows for exporting the configuration of an existing cluster. You can refer to transporting configuration using ml-gradle for more details.

While ml-gradle is an open source community project that is not directly supported, it enjoys very good community and developer support.  The underlying APIs that ml-gradle uses are fully supported by MarkLogic.

Configuration Management API

An additional option is to use the Configuration Management API directly to export and import resources.

Summary

Both ml-gradle and the Configuration Management API use the MarkLogic Admin API behind the scenes but, for most use cases, our recommendation is to use ml-gradle rather than writing the same functionality from scratch.