Moving "data" from Cloud Service to Self-hosted

[billydekid]

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Hi,
I'm new on Dify and AI Agent development.
I will start my journey with Cloud Service and it might to move to self-hosted environment someday.

Is it possible to move "our data" (as far as I know is only the Weaviate vector DB) to export to my self-hosted Dify?
If so, does Dify have documentation on this?

Thank you,

[dosubot[bot]]

Hi @billydekid! I'm Dosu and I'm helping the Dify team.

There's no official Cloud-to-self-hosted migration guide yet, but migration is partially possible. Here's what you should know:

It's not just the vector DB — Dify uses a hybrid architecture: PostgreSQL (apps, workflows, conversations, knowledge base metadata) + a pluggable vector database (Weaviate, Qdrant, PGVector, etc.) for embeddings + file storage for uploaded documents [1].

What you can migrate:

• Apps & Workflows — Export as DSL (YAML) via GET /apps/<app_id>/export and import to self-hosted via POST /apps/imports [2] [3]. This is the most straightforward path.
• Knowledge Bases — This is the hardest part. Original uploaded documents and vector embeddings cannot be downloaded directly via the Cloud API [4]. You'd need to re-upload your source documents and re-index them on your self-hosted instance.
• Annotations & Feedback — Exportable as CSV/JSON via API [5].

Recommended approach:

1. Start on Cloud as planned — export your apps/workflows as DSL files when ready to migrate.
2. Keep copies of all original documents you upload to Knowledge Bases, since you'll need to re-upload and re-index them on self-hosted.
3. Test imports on a staging self-hosted instance first, as version mismatches between Cloud and your self-hosted version can cause failures [6].

Limitations to be aware of:

• Apps using remote/marketplace plugins may need plugin references removed before export [6]
• Conversations/chat history don't have a simple one-click migration path
• There's no database-level export from Cloud (you don't have direct DB access)

This is a common request from other users as well [7] [4], so keeping your source documents organized externally will make eventual migration much smoother.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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Docs are dead. Just use Dosu.

[billydekid]

Thank you for the guidance and limitations aware.