Use

Adopt

Bring an existing installation under iac – check, back up, align.

What “adopt” means

You already set up a service by hand and want to maintain it with update from now on. adopt.sh brings it to the state of an iac installation – without reinstalling and with your data.

Apps that can do this show the section “Adopt an existing installation” on their page.

How it works

Requirements: Debian 12 or 13 and at least 512 MiB RAM – Ansible and apt need that much together. A smaller container can be enlarged on the Proxmox host first: pct set <ID> --memory 512. With less, the adoption stops before it changes anything.

In the existing guest as root:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://iac.heyer.systems/<app>/adopt.sh)"     # -y: no question

1. Check – Debian version, kind of installation, paths, configuration. Changes nothing yet.
2. Ask – what will be adopted.
3. Back up – the app’s important paths, before any change.
4. Align – move existing data and configuration into the iac layout, then the target state like every installation.

Afterwards everything works like a fresh installation: update, modules, firewall.

When it cannot be done automatically

If the check finds something that cannot be adopted safely (e.g. another major version or a Docker installation), it stops before any change and names the reason. Then the app’s migration guide helps (linked on its page): create a new guest and move the data.