How to migrate phoenixd to another machine
I’d like to start off by saying that phoenixd has been a great experience so far. The install (on a Linux machine) was as easy as depicted on their website.
And the channel I opened via auto liquidity was super simple. I didn’t have to pick an LSP and I won’t need to manage liquidity.
Unfortunately, the machine I installed the software on started to freeze seconds after every boot. After posting about it here and getting an answer from DarthCoin (npub1lxk…5xlc), I was surprised at how easy the migration seemed.
It really was just a matter of restoring the seed words on another phoenixd instance. Of course, making sure that the two instances don’t run at the same time.
As easy as it was, I wanted to create this post to give a quick overview for those who might be less tech savvy.
Step 1
Grab seed words from the seed.dat file in hidden.phoenix folder on the old machine.
Step 2
Install phoenixd on the new machine
$ wget https://github.com/ACINQ/phoenixd/releases/download/v0.4.2/phoenix-0.4.2-linux-x64.zip
$ unzip -j phoenix-0.4.2-linux-x64.zip
$ # run the daemon: that's it!
$ ./phoenixd
Step 3
(This is the step that wasn’t super clear and why I wanted to spell it out in this post)
In order to install the software, ./phoenixd has to be run. This is going to generate a new seed phrase.
Now, all you need to do is replace the seed words in seed.dat with the ones from the original install.
In retrospect, I think you can replace the seed words right after unzipping the zip file and before running ./phoenixd. That will probably achieve the same result.
Step 4
Once the seed words have been restored. Just run ./phoenixd again and it’ll start up like nothing happened.
Literally.
There was no indication whatsoever that something had changed, so I ran ./phoenix-cli getinfo and, voila, there was my 2M-sat channel.
It was quite magical.
originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/829411
Update (1/1/2025)
Phoenix Support got back to me and confirmed that the migration can be even simpler. You can actually just copy the ~/.phoenix directory onto the new machine and run ./phoenix!
