The pieces existed across three pages and nothing connected them, so "can we go
from IIS to Docker" had no answer to point at. It is a fair question with a
short answer: the application keeps state in exactly two places, the database
and the instance directory, and nothing is encrypted at rest with SECRET_KEY or
JWT_SECRET_KEY, so a move is a dump plus a directory copy. The schema is
identical across topologies.
What the page spends its length on is the part that is NOT the data, because
that is where the time goes. The server address is baked into things that are
not the server: GE-Enforce manifests, the generated collector script, the
printer client scripts, and printed QR codes, which cannot be swept at all.
Keeping the hostname and repointing DNS makes the migration invisible to the
fleet; changing it does not.
Three other traps, each of which has a symptom that shows up later rather than
at cutover: an aliased IIS site needs MOUNT_PATH and a dist built for that
subpath, while the image builds for the root; an older dump can carry latin1 or
3-byte utf8 table definitions that load quietly into a utf8mb4 server and only
misbehave on the first accented name; and a restored instance directory needs
chown, because docker cp writes under the copying user's uid and the container
runs as shopdb.
Covers both directions plus Docker to a new Docker host, and ends with a cutover
checklist that leaves the old stack stopped rather than removed until a bay has
checked in on a working day.
Also fixes two links in START-HERE that pointed at files which are not there:
the ADR index needed its adr/ prefix, and LLM-GUIDE.md is llms.txt.
