bluesky-account-migrator

A Node.js CLI for migrating Bluesky accounts from one PDS to another.

Warning

This is community-maintained software. It has no affiliation with Bluesky the company. Use at your own risk.

bluesky-account-migrator is currently in a beta state. If a migration fails, you will have to figure out how to recover on your own. See troubleshooting for more details.

Installation

# In a package
npm install bluesky-account-migrator

# Globally
npm install -g bluesky-account-migrator

Or the equivalent incantation using your package manager of choice.

Usage

Migrating your Bluesky account is a potentially destructive operation that can result in losing access to the account. This CLI files away some of the rough edges, but it's far from perfect, and can't help you recover if the migration fails (although you may be able to do so yourself, see troubleshooting).

To get a better understanding of the risks and steps involved in account migration, see Bluesky's account migration guide. The implementation of this package is based on the snippet in that guide.

Requirements

• A did:plc Bluesky account
  • If don't know what this means, you're almost certainly fine.
• A PDS to migrate to
  • Ideally, this PDS has SMTP enabled in order to verify your email. Bluesky the app will ask you to do this for the new account.
• Two-factor authentication (2FA) disabled on your Bluesky account.
  • This is only required for the duration of the migration.

Gotchas

Custom handles

You cannot submit custom handles—i.e. ones that do not end with .bsky.social— as your new handle. Bluesky's PDS implementation requires that all handles are a subdomain of the PDS hostname. For example, if your PDS is hosted at pds.foo.com, new accounts must have handles of the form *.pds.foo.com. If you already have a custom handle, you can configure it for your migrated account after the migration. See e.g. this discussion for how to do this.

CLI

The CLI has a single command migrate, which you can run using e.g. npx:

npx bluesky-account-migrator migrate [--mode <mode>]

The CLI has two modes.

interactive

This will interactively walk you through migrating your Bluesky account from one PDS to another. It will collect most of the necessary information upfront, such as the PDS URLs, account handles, etc., then ask if you want to start the migration:

? Perform the migration with these credentials? (Y/n)

Migrating your account requires completing an email challenge. Assuming all goes well, the migration will run until the challenge email has been sent. You will have to retrieve the confirmation token in this email and provide it to the CLI to complete the migration:

An email should have been sent to the old account's email address.

? Enter the confirmation token from the challenge email

If the challenge token is correct, the migration should complete successfully. At the end of the migration, the private recovery key will be printed to the terminal. You must save this key in a secure location, or you could lose access to your account.

pipe

This causes the CLI to read from stdin and write to stdout. It will only output the results of running the migraiton to stdout, and any errors or other logs will be written to stderr.

Given a file credentials.json with the following contents:

{
  "credentials": {
    "oldPdsUrl": "https://old.bsky.social",
    "newPdsUrl": "https://new.bsky.social",
    "oldHandle": "old.handle.com",
    "oldPassword": "oldpass123",
    "newHandle": "new.handle.com",
    "newEmail": "new@email.com",
    "newPassword": "newpass123",
    "inviteCode": "invite-123"
  }
}

The CLI can then be invoked as follows:

cat credentials.json | npx bluesky-account-migrator --mode pipe > result.json

If the credentials are correct, result.json should look like this:

{
  "state": "RequestedPlcOperation",
  "credentials": {
    "oldPdsUrl": "https://old.bsky.social",
    "newPdsUrl": "https://new.bsky.social",
    "oldHandle": "old.handle.com",
    "oldPassword": "oldpass123",
    "newHandle": "new.handle.com",
    "newEmail": "new@email.com",
    "newPassword": "newpass123",
    "inviteCode": "invite-123"
  }
}

In this state, the migration should have dispatched a challenge email to the email associated with the account on the old PDS. Once you have retrieved the confirmation token from the email, you can complete the migration like so:

cat result.json | \
  jq '. + {"confirmationToken": "<Token>"}' | \
  npx bluesky-account-migrator migrate --mode pipe > \
  finalResult.json

If the confirmation token is correct, finalResult.json should look like this:

{
  "state": "Finalized",
  "credentials": {
    "oldPdsUrl": "https://old.bsky.social",
    "newPdsUrl": "https://new.bsky.social",
    "oldHandle": "old.handle.com",
    "oldPassword": "oldpass123",
    "newHandle": "new.handle.com",
    "newEmail": "new@email.com",
    "newPassword": "newpass123",
    "inviteCode": "invite-123"
  },
  "confirmationToken": "<Token>",
  "newPrivateKey": "<PrivateKey>"
}

Important

If the migration fails the CLI will exit with a non-zero error code, but the result will still be written to stdout. This enables retrieving the generated private key, if any.

To retrieve the migration output, you must ensure that your script handles failures appropriately. For example, you cannot naively use set -e in Bash, since that would prevent capturing the output on failure. Instead, capture the output and check the exit code separately:

output=$(cat result.json | npx bluesky-account-migrator migrate --mode pipe)
exit_code=$?

if [ $exit_code -ne 0 ]; then
  echo "Migration failed with exit code $exit_code" >&2
  echo "Output was:" >&2
  echo "$output" >&2
  exit $exit_code
fi

echo "$output" > finalResult.json

API

The migration is implemented as a state machine in the form of the Migration class. You can run a migration programmatically as follows:

import { Migration, MigrationState } from 'bluesky-account-migrator';

const credentials = {
  oldPdsUrl: 'https://old.bsky.social',
  oldHandle: 'old.handle.com',
  oldPassword: 'oldpass123',
  inviteCode: 'invite-123',
  newPdsUrl: 'https://new.bsky.social',
  newHandle: 'new.handle.com',
  newEmail: 'new@email.com',
  newPassword: 'newpass123',
};

const migration = new Migration({ credentials });

let result = await migration.run();
if (result !== 'RequestedPlcOperation') {
  // Something has gone extremely wrong if this happens
  throw new Error('unexpected migration state');
}

// You have to get this from the challenge email and make it available
// to your program somehow
const confirmationToken = '...';
migration.confirmationToken = confirmationToken;

result = await migration.run();
if (result !== 'Finalized') {
  // Again, something has gone extremely wrong if this happens
  throw new Error('unexpected migration state');
}

// This is the recovery private key for the account, which must be stored
// somewhere or risk the loss of the account
storeSomewhereSafe(migration.newPrivateKey);

If you need to persist an unfinished migration, e.g. on failure or when getting the confirmation token, you can use the serialize()/deserialize() methods:

const migration = new Migration({ credentials });
await migration.run();

// NOTE: This will output the user's passwords and private key in plaintext,
// if present.
const serialized = migration.serialize();
saveMigration(JSON.stringify(serialized, null, 2));

// Later
const savedMigration = loadMigration();
const migration = Migration.deserialize(JSON.parse(savedMigration));
migration.confirmationToken = confirmationToken;
await migration.run();

Troubleshooting

Important

If you encounter any problems with bluesky-account-migrator, please file an issue.

Migration failure

If your migration fails, you are alone in strange territory. However, all is not lost. While bluesky-account-migrator is not (yet) equipped to resume partial migrations, the error should tell you where it failed. In addition, the migration is implemented as a state machine, and you should be able to figure out what's left to do by consulting this file. In brief, each state maps to an "operation", which is essentially a function wrapping a set of logically associated API calls. By identifying the error and the remaining API calls, you can likely compose a script that completes the rest of the migration.

Other issues

• Missing data / blobs
  • It may be the case that your migrated account is missing data / blobs.
  • You can verify this manually using com.atproto.server.checkAccountStatus.
  • Finding missing data is currently out of scope for this CLI.