Import & Export

Turing ES supports exporting and importing Semantic Navigation site configurations as ZIP archives. This allows you to migrate sites between environments, create backups, or share configurations across teams.

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Export

Export creates a ZIP archive containing a complete snapshot of one or all SN Sites, including field definitions, facet settings, spotlights, ranking expressions, merge providers, locale configuration, and GenAI settings.

Export a Single Site

GET /api/sn/{id}/export

Export All Sites

GET /api/sn/export

Both endpoints require authentication via the Key header. The response is a downloadable ZIP file containing an export.json with the full site configuration.

Example:

curl "http://localhost:2700/api/sn/export" \
  -H "Key: <YOUR_API_TOKEN>" \
  -o turing-sites-export.zip

Export Contents

The export.json inside the ZIP archive contains:

Section	Description
snSites	Complete SN Site configurations: fields, facets, spotlights, ranking expressions, merge providers, locales, and GenAI settings
llm	LLM instance references used by sites with GenAI enabled
store	Embedding store instance references
se	Search engine instance references

Instance references never carry an owning tenant. When multi-tenancy is enabled, a tenant id only identifies the installation that created it, so it is left out of the archive — an imported instance is claimed by whoever imports it, and one imported with no tenant bound stays shared (GLOBAL).

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Seeding a fresh installation

On the first startup against an empty database, Turing ES imports every .zip it finds in the export/ directory of its working directory (alphabetical order). Use this to open a new environment with your sites, LLM instances, search engines and embedding stores already configured — no admin clicks, no API calls.

/app/export/           # in the Docker image
  defaults.zip
  my-sites.zip

A bundle may contain only instance configuration, with no site at all. That is the normal shape of a defaults bundle:

{
  "se": [ { "id": "…", "title": "Default Search Engine", "enabled": 1,
            "endpointUrl": "./store/lucene-se",
            "turSEVendor": { "id": "LUCENE" } } ]
}

What the Docker image already seeds

The official image ships /app/export/defaults.zip with two shared instances, both embedded and requiring no external service or credential:

Instance	Vendor	Path
Default Search Engine	LUCENE	./store/lucene-se
Default Vector Store	LUCENE	./store/lucene-vector

Both live under /app/store, which the image declares as a volume, and both are shared: with multi-tenancy enabled, every tenant can use them without configuring anything of their own.

No LLM instance is seeded — an exported LLM carries its API key encrypted with the key of the installation that exported it. Set OPENAI_API_KEY or GEMINI_API_KEY instead and Turing ES provisions a default LLM at startup (see LLM instances).

Seeding your own defaults

Mount your bundle into export/ before the first startup:

docker run -v ./my-defaults.zip:/app/export/my-defaults.zip \
  -e TURING_TENANCY_ENABLED=true \
  viglet/turing

Export from a configured environment to produce the bundle — the archive an admin export gives you is exactly the format this reads.

One shot per database

Once every ZIP in export/ has imported, Turing ES records an EXPORT_AUTO_IMPORT marker and never scans the directory again, so changing a bundle later has no effect on an existing database. Adding a ZIP still works if the directory was absent or empty at first startup, because nothing was recorded then.

When a seed ZIP fails

A ZIP that fails to import — a truncated file, a missing export.json, a malformed archive — is retried on the next startup. The "done" marker is written only when every ZIP in the directory succeeded, so a bad seed does not quietly disable seeding for that database.

Archives that did import are recorded individually and are not imported a second time on that retry. This matters: re-importing a bundle that contains a site replaces that site, discarding changes made to it since, so only the failures are re-run.

The startup log says which is which:

Successfully auto-imported 'defaults.zip'.
Failed to auto-import 'my-sites.zip': Missing required export.json in ZIP
Auto-import from 'export' incomplete — 1 of 2 ZIP file(s) failed. The successful
ones are recorded and will not be re-imported; the failures will be retried on
the next start.

Fix the archive and restart. To force a completed directory to be imported again, delete the EXPORT_AUTO_IMPORT* rows from the config_var table — but read the replacement warning above first.

If your deployment runs more than one container, give them all the same encryption key — otherwise the API keys inside a seeded bundle cannot be decrypted. See Security & authentication.

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Import

The import page (/admin/exchange/import) accepts a ZIP file previously exported from Turing ES and recreates the site configurations in the target environment.

Using the Admin Console

1. Navigate to Import in the sidebar
2. Drag and drop a ZIP file onto the upload area, or click to browse
3. The upload progress is displayed in real time (percentage bar)
4. On success, you are automatically redirected to the SN Sites listing after 2 seconds

Supported formats: .zip files exported from Turing ES.

UI states:

State	Description
Idle	Dashed border with upload icon: ready for file drop or click
Uploading	Blue background with spinning loader and progress percentage
Success	Green border with checkmark: "Import Completed" message and auto-redirect
Error	Red border with error message and "Try Again" button

Using the REST API

POST /api/import

Accepts a multipart/form-data request with a file parameter containing the ZIP archive. Authentication required.

Example:

curl -X POST "http://localhost:2700/api/import" \
  -H "Key: <YOUR_API_TOKEN>" \
  -F "file=@turing-sites-export.zip"

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Content Import (SN Job Items)

In addition to site configuration import, Turing ES accepts document-level indexing jobs via the SN Import API. This is used by connectors and custom integrations to push content into the search index.

JSON Import

POST /api/sn/import

Accepts a JSON body with a list of job items: documents to index, deindex, or commit.

Example:

curl -X POST "http://localhost:2700/api/sn/import" \
  -H "Key: <YOUR_API_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "snJobItems": [
      {
        "locale": "en_US",
        "turSNJobAction": "CREATE",
        "siteNames": ["Sample"],
        "attributes": {
          "id": "doc-001",
          "title": "Getting Started Guide",
          "text": "This guide explains how to get started...",
          "url": "https://example.com/getting-started"
        }
      }
    ]
  }'

ZIP Import (with file attachments)

POST /api/sn/import/zip

Accepts a multipart/form-data ZIP file containing an export.json with job items. Document attributes can reference embedded files using the file:// protocol, Turing ES extracts text from these files using Apache Tika before indexing.

Job Actions

Action	Description
CREATE	Index or update a document in the search engine
DELETE	Remove a document from the index
COMMIT	Commit pending changes to the search engine

Job Item Structure

Field	Type	Description
locale	string	Document locale (e.g., en_US)
turSNJobAction	string	CREATE, DELETE, or COMMIT
siteNames	string[]	Target SN Site names
attributes	map	Document fields: must include id
checksum	string	Optional content checksum for change detection
environment	string	Optional: AUTHOR or PUBLISHING

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Related Pages

Page	Description
Semantic Navigation	SN Site configuration
Integration	Content connectors that automate document import
REST API Reference	Full API endpoint reference
Developer Guide	Java SDK and JavaScript SDK for programmatic import

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