Moving Storage on Alteryx Analytics Hub

You’re going to be saving lots of assets in Alteryx Analytics Hub. Before you know it, you may fill up that hard drive of yours with all the wonderful things you’ve created. What’s a person to do when they’re maxing out storage and still creating so much joy? If you didn’t realize, joy requires hard disk space.

Never fear. Don’t postpone joy. Just move your storage.

Alteryx Analytics Hub (AAH) records the location of your file-based /storage folder (which by default can be found in (C:\Program Files\Alteryx\vfs) in two places:

• The Settings.yml file
• The platform.plt_settings table inside your PostgreSQL repository

Update these values, and you’re good to go. This technique is especially useful if you decide you want to encrypt your storage at rest: use the disk encryption software of your choice to encrypt a volume, stop AAH and copy the /storage folder to the volume, then change the settings above.

NOTE: Before you play with this, backup your server. Make sure you store your config files, Postgres database, SSL certs, and /storage folder somewhere safe. Promise me.

NOTE NOTE: This technique is for those storing assets on the local file system (FS_LOCAL). If for some reason you are storing your assets in PostgreSQL, stop now! This article isn’t for you.

Ready?

• You took a backup, right?
• Stop AAH using ayxhub.ps1 -stop 
• Open C:\Program Files\Alteryx\Alteryx Analytics Hub\Settings.yml
• Replace the value for ayxserver.binary_storage.path with a pointer to the disk and folder which you’ll copy /storage into

Update Settings,yml

• Grab the /storage folder from C:\Program Files\Alteryx\vfs and drop it into the location you specified in ayxserver.binary_storage.path
• Connect to the ngp repository database of your AAH Server. Not sure how? The backup article you already should have looked at tells you how. Don’t cheat!
• After you’ve selected the ngp database in PgAdmin, use the Tools menu to launch the Query Tool

• Issue the following query, replacing the value below with your location. Note the “escaped” backslashes! Follow this pattern.

UPDATE platform.plt_settings SET binary_storage_settings = '{"path":"D:\\vfs","type":"FS_LOCAL"}'

Mess up? You can go back to the default value with this guy:

UPDATE platform.plt_settings SET binary_storage_settings = '{"path":"C:\\Program Files\\Alteryx\\vfs","type":"FS_LOCAL"}'

• Start AAH with ayxhub.ps1 -start

That’s it. Your storage has been moved. Go make more stuff. Fill the world with joy.