How to migrate your blog from WordPress to Hashnode

This is a step-by-step guide for migrating a blog from WordPress to Hashnode.

Thanks to Tina Holly's blog post and scripts which helped me migrate my WordPress blog site to Hashnode. This blog post builds on the same but provides a more detailed guide on the migration.

We will cover the migration in 4 main steps :

Download post content from WordPress
Download images
Publish posts to Hashnode using their API
- Get migration scripts
- Clean the downloaded posts
- Publish posts to Hashnode
Backdate the posts and manually fix the images

Download post content from WordPress

To begin the migration, you would need to first download your existing posts on WordPress. By default, these are in XML format, but we will use the WP Import Export Lite to export the posts as JSON.

Head to your WordPress site's admin panel.
Navigate to Plugins -> Add New and search for wp import export lite.
Install and Activate the 'WP Import Export Lite' plugin.
Now that the plugin is installed and activated, click on the Export option in the plugin.
On the New Export options page,
1. Choose export type as Post.
2. Leave the filtering options & fields section as is.
3. In the advanced options section, choose export file type as JSON.
4. Click on the Customize Export File button at the top right corner to begin the export.
5. Once the export process is completed, click on the Download button to download the post's json file.
6. The downloaded file will have an array of objects having the following shape.
```
{
 "ID": "161",
 "Title": "Understanding CRON Expressions",
 "Content": "Many Azure resources like web jobs, Azure functions, logic apps use CRON expression [...]",
 "Excerpt": "",
 "Date": "August 29, 2018",
 "Post Type": "post",
 "Permalink": "http:\/\/kumarashwinhubert.com\/2018\/08\/29\/understanding-cron-expressions\/"
}
```
7. Rename the downloaded json file to posts.json

Download images

Next, you will need to download all your images from WordPress. Images are stored in the ./wp-content/uploads directory by year and month. There are many ways to download the images, but the easiest one is to use an SFTP tool to download this folder.

wp-content/
└── uploads
    ├── 2018
    │   ├── 01
    │   ├── 02
    │   └── 03
    └── 2019
        ├── 01
        ├── 02
        └── 03

Note: Currently there's no automatic way to migrate the images along with your blog post content. This article targets manually uploading the image to hashnode's CDN and updating the migrated blog posts at the end. In case you wish to use some other storage provider, please upload the images and replace the url in the posts.json file before proceeding further.

Publish posts to Hashnode using their API

Hashnode has a GraphQL API. It's somewhat limited in functionality but has most of the basic features. The API we intend to use is the createPublicationStory; but instead of manually cleaning the downloaded posts json and creating the request body to hit the API, we can use the migration scripts present in WordPress-Hashnode Migrator GitHub project.

The next set of steps will use this GitHub project to clean and publish the posts. This project is a node application hence ensure node is installed on your system.

Get migration scripts

Clone the WordPress-Hashnode Migrator project from GitHub.
Copy the downloaded posts.json from the earlier step to the root of the cloned project.
Rename the .env.sample to .env The folder structure will look like this:
Open a terminal in the cloned project and install the dependencies:
```
npm install
```

Clean the downloaded posts

This step processes the posts in ./posts.json and performs the following actions:

removes dirty attributes from content HTML
converts post content to Markdown
writes a new file in ./posts/cleaned.json

Run the following command to clean the posts.

npm run cleanse

Publish posts to Hashnode

Ensure that you have already created a Hashnode site; if not, now would be a good time to create one as we need the Publication_Id and API_Key to continue.

Head to the dashboard of your hashnode site. Copy and keep the publicationId from the url which would be in the form https://hashnode.com/[Publication_Id]/dashboard
Navigate to the Developer settings page - https://hashnode.com/settings/developer and Generate New Token.
Open the .env file in the project. Replace the HASHNODE_PUBLICATION_ID value with your publication id and HASHNODE_API_KEY with your generated key.

The .env file should look like this :

HASHNODE_PUBLICATION_ID=602xxxa999eabxxxxxxx1a9b
HASHNODE_API_KEY=030xx44x-exx6-4xx4-8xxe-52xxxxxxxx1a

Save the .env file and head back to the terminal and run the following command to publish the posts to hashnode.

npm run migrate

migrate script output.png

Once the script executes successfully, the blog posts would have been published to your hashnode site.

Backdate the posts and manually fix the images

Currently backdating the posts is not supported in Hashnode's GraphQL API, hence it's required to manually update the backdate on each of the posts.

Navigate to each of the migrated posts and click on Edit -> Settings and set the backdate. Also set the tags & Cover Image if required. Publish on backdate.png

As mentioned earlier, there isn't an easy way to migrate the images from your WordPress blog. You need to manually update the image in each blog post.

Navigate to each of the migrated posts and you would see the references to old images in the form of /wp-content/uploads/2020/08/filename.png. Use the Upload an image option in hashnode editor to upload the image from the WordPress images downloaded earlier. Upload an Image.png

Conclusion

That's it !!!
Your hashnode blog is up and running with all your migrated WordPress posts.

Hope this helped you in your migration journey from WordPress to Hashnode.

Ashwin's Blog