ACCESS FEDERATION: How to change the Access federation topology from star to mesh topology and vice versa

In certain scenarios, you may want to change the Access federation topology configured between the Artifactory instances. You can follow the below steps to change the Access federation topology from star to mesh topology and vice versa.

In order to remove a synchronization target that has been registered with an Access service, you need to remove it from the YAML configuration file and reload the file as described in Uploading the YAML File. 

For example: Tested with the 7.x version.

1.  Configured a STAR topology from HOME instance to target instance, you can see that "HOME" is syncing Users, Groups, Permissions, and Tokens to target “secondary”.



2.  Edit the "access.config.latest.yml" file of the source “Home instance” which is located at $JFROG_HOME/artifactory/var/etc/access.




3.  Remove the target node from the "outbound" ruleset. Here in my example, As I only had 1 server that HOME (source) was synchronizing to target (secondary). Removed the target server details.



4.  After removing the target node (secondary) from the outbound rules of the Source node (HOME), rename the file "access.config.latest.yml" to "access.config.import.yml" under $JFROG_HOME/artifactory/var/etc/access path.

>> mv access.config.latest.yml access.config.import.yml

5. Restart the source Artifactory instance (HOME), the changes should be reflected post-restart, and when visiting the Access Federation page you should see that the entities are no longer syncing to your target node.



Then, you can go ahead with creating the Start/Mesh Access federation topology as explained here.

NOTE: Deleting topologies do not sync-delete previously synced entities (as it persisted them as internal users/groups/tokens).