After the acquisition of Parse in 2013, Facebook turned Parse into its key developer service. The news of Facebook’s decision on closing down Parse took the mobile app development companies and developers by storm. Parse hosted service will be retired on January 28, 2017.
With this announcement, developers have no option left, but to move their products to another platform. The good news is that Parse has provided Parse Server as an open source version of the Parse backend that can be deployed on any platform that runs Node.js.
Moreover, Facebook has also published Parse migration guide to simplify the migration process to any MongoDB database. If you don’t want to host things yourself, there are other commercial alternatives to Parse, for example, Firebase, Syncano, CloudKit, Kinvey, CloudMine, Kony, Telerik etc.
Here are some ways to migrate your Android and iOS app from Parse:
- Migrating Parse Database to self-hosted MongoDB Setting up MongoDB instance, this can be done using either mLab or ObjectRocket. Once you have Mongo set up, take note of the Mongo connection URL. Use database migration tool to transfer the data.
- Setup the local Parse Server, it will keep it connected to the data located in the database, while your app is running locally
Here you need to keep in mind that Parse Server is not compatible with Parse hosted backend.
- Migrate existing Cloud Code to the Parse Server. But, some of the native Parse modules are not available on the Parse Server.
- For Parse migration to your own self-hosted instance, the Parse library needs to be at least version 1.12 for iOS or 1.13.0 for Android.
- You can install your Parse Server to any infrastructure provider such as AWS or Heroku and then you can change the code using platform backend.
- If you are using Parse hosting, then you can migrate all the web endpoints to the same app that is serving Parse Server.
Migrating Parse database:
- The first step is to migrate your Parse database to self-hosted MongoDB.
- Once it is done, you will be able to adjust your apps request limit up to 600 requests/second.
- After this, your app’s traffic at api.parse.com will be given priority over the once who have not migrated their data.
While selecting any of the services you should always look for following things before your final decision:
- See if you can get complete control over the source code of your mobile app
- Find out if you can download the runtime features of your app backend and deploy it anywhere as you want
- Check whether vendor gives you Intellectual Property (IP) rights of app components
Checking these things will save you from facing Parse like the situation in future. To make your migration process simple, select the company that has expertise in backend and cloud computing.
Till now, mobile app developers only had to manage client side code, which was done easily with the help of administration tool. But with the migration to Parse Server, a developer not only has to work with Parse SDK, but also manage instance that runs Parse Server and also manage their own database that connects to the Parse Server.
Process of Application data migration on your own backend
- Open your Parse dashboard
- In-app, setting selects General option
- Click on export data
- You will receive a zip URL on your mail, this will contain whole app data in JSON format
- And, you can upload it on your own backend
Self-hosting MongoDB through Parse Server is thought to be one of the simplest alternatives for migration of small mobile applications that do not include or depend on push notification, large infrastructure or analytics.