Admin

cPanel Importer Overview

Overview of Opterius's cPanel migration importer — what it imports, how it works, and what you need before starting.

Last updated 1775606400

Opterius can import cPanel accounts from standard pkgacct backup archives. This covers the full account: website files, databases, email accounts and Maildir, DNS zones, SSL certificates, and cron jobs. Migration runs as a background queue job — you do not need to keep the browser open while it processes.

What the importer handles

Component Imported
Files public_html and full home directory
Databases Full structure and data dump, users created, passwords regenerated
Email Accounts created, Maildir contents preserved
DNS zones All record types, IP addresses rewritten to new server
SSL certificates Imported if not expired
Cron jobs Imported, paths rewritten if username changes

For a complete breakdown of what is and is not imported, see What Gets Migrated.

How the importer works

  1. You generate a pkgacct backup on the source cPanel server.
  2. You transfer the archive to the Opterius server.
  3. In the panel you point the importer at the archive path and trigger a parse.
  4. The panel presents a preview of everything it found in the archive.
  5. You configure import options (username, package, which components to include).
  6. You start the migration. A queue job is dispatched to opterius-queue.service, which processes the import in the background.
  7. Progress is reported in the panel.

Prerequisites

Before starting a migration:

  • opterius-queue.service must be running. All migration jobs are processed by the queue worker. If it is stopped, jobs will queue but not execute.

    systemctl status opterius-queue
systemctl start opterius-queue   # if not running

  • SSH or root access to the source cPanel server to run pkgacct and transfer the backup.

  • Enough disk space on the Opterius server to hold the archive during import. The import expands the archive temporarily — allow 2–3x the archive size in available disk space.

  • The target account package should be created in Opterius before migration if you want to assign specific resource limits.

File path differences from cPanel

Opterius uses a different webroot structure than cPanel. This is handled automatically during import, but be aware of it for any hardcoded paths in application configs:

cPanel path Opterius path
/home/alice/public_html/ /home/alice/domain.com/public_html/

Application config files that reference /home/username/public_html directly (rare but it happens in some WordPress plugins) may need to be updated manually after migration.

Next steps

Next
What Gets Migrated →