Exporting and importing into single files can produce large files, so if your database contains more than 500 users, export to a directory and not a single file.
Using a directory performs better as the directory provider uses a separate transaction for each "page" (a file of users).
The default count of users per file and per transaction is fifty.
Increasing this to a larger number leads to an exponentially increasing execution time.
When using the `export` and the `import` commands below, {project_name} needs to know how to connect to the database where the information about realms, clients, users and other entities is stored.
As described in <@links.server id="configuration"/> that information can be provided as command line parameters, environment variables or a configuration file.
Use the `--help` command line option for each command to see the available options.
Some of the configuration options are build time configuration options.
If you have built an optimized version of {project_name} with the `build` command as outlined in <@links.server id="configuration"/>, use the command line option `--optimized` to have Keycloak skip the build check for a faster startup time.
To export a realm to a directory, you can use the `--dir <dir>` option.
<@kc.export parameters="--dir <dir>"/>
When exporting realms to a directory, the server is going to create separate files for each realm being exported.
=== Configuring how users are exported
You are also able to configure how users are going to be exported by setting the `--users <strategy>` option. The values available for this
option are:
* *different_files*: Users export into different json files, depending on the maximum number of users per file set by `--users-per-file`. This is the default value.
* *skip*: Skips exporting users.
* *realm_file*: Users will be exported to the same file as the realm settings. For a realm named "foo", this would be "foo-realm.json" with realm data and users.
* *same_file*: All users are exported to one explicit file. So you will get two json files for a realm, one with realm data and one with users.
If you are exporting users using the `different_files` strategy, you can set how many users per file you want by setting the `--users-per-file` option. The default value is `50`.
After exporting a realm to a directory, you can use the `--dir <dir>` option to import the realm back to the server as follows:
<@kc.import parameters="--dir <dir>"/>
When importing realms using the `import` command, you are able to set if existing realms should be skipped, or if they should be overridden with the new configuration. For that,
When you set the `--import-realm` option, the server is going to try to import any realm configuration file from the `data/import` directory. Only regular files using the `.json` extension are read from this directory, sub-directories are ignored.
