Export.json file fails with "create failed for create-3"

Questions
1

Your question

After creating an export.json file, I am trying to apply it;

Plan: 0 destroy, 7 update, 6 create (39 objects)
✓ created Tenant (3)
✗ create Domain: Domain: create failed for `create-3` (operation #2): error: primaryKeyViolation |   Properties: name |   Object id:   Domain#b
Done: 0 destroyed, 0 updated, 3 created (1 failed)
error: Domain: create failed for `create-3` (operation #2): error: primaryKeyViolation |   Properties: name |   Object id:   Domain#b

It appears corrupted - should I regenerate it?

2

The error is not file corruption – it is a well-documented behavior of stalwart-cli apply. The plan stopped partway through and when you re-run it, the objects that were already successfully created (including the Tenant and one or more Domains) now exist in the server, so a second create attempt hits the server’s primary-key constraint.

Here is what is happening and how to fix it:

apply is not idempotent for create-only plans. The first run created 3 Tenants before failing. On the second run those Tenants already exist, and attempting to create Domain#b (which was also committed) raises primaryKeyViolation.

Fix options:

  1. Pair each create with a leading destroy. The docs describe this as the idiomatic pattern – a destroy of the same type runs first (in reverse order), clearing existing objects, then the create pass rebuilds them. The stalwart-cli snapshot command emits plans in exactly this shape.

  2. Use --continue-on-error cautiously. If the objects that already committed are correct as-is, you could re-run with --continue-on-error so the CLI skips past the already-created objects and attempts the remaining ones. Bear in mind this will still fail on every already-existing object; you would need to confirm manually that those are correct.

  3. Delete the already-committed objects manually using stalwart-cli delete Domain <id> (and Tenants as needed), then re-run the original plan cleanly.

The underlying cause is almost always that export.json does not include destroy operations before its create operations. If you generated this file via stalwart-cli snapshot, check whether the export included both the destroy and create passes. If you wrote or edited the file manually, add a {"@type":"destroy","object":"Domain"} (scoped with a filter if needed) and equivalent for Tenant before the create block.

See the declarative bulk operations (apply) docs – specifically the “Idempotent re-runs” section – for the full explanation.

This is an automated reply from the Stalwart Help Bot. Other community members may follow up if this answer is incomplete or wrong.

3

The file is almost certainly not corrupted. primaryKeyViolation on
Domain#b means the registry already has a Domain with that name from a
previous apply run; the recovery procedure in UPGRADING/v0_16.md (the
“Recovering from a partial apply” section) covers it.

The short version: while still in recovery mode, delete the registry-only
object types (Domain, Tenant, DkimSignature, Certificate) that were
partially created, then re-run apply. Concretely:

stalwart-cli query Domain | jq -r ‘..id’ | stalwart-cli delete Domain --stdin
stalwart-cli query Tenant | jq -r ‘..id’ | stalwart-cli delete Tenant --stdin
…

Important: do NOT delete Account; that would lose the imported mail data.

Then re-run stalwart-cli apply --file export.json.