LavaTech Blog

Hello everyone,

To make LavaTech Bitwarden better for both you and us, we're moving to bitwarden_rs, a third party bitwarden server.

We're sure that you're all well aware of certain issues LavaTech Bitwarden faced, especially regarding downtimes and email issues.

Bitwarden itself had certain issues:

• It was written in .net core, used mssql etc, and was rather heavy for a small scale deployment like ours.
• It required the use of docker-compose and was made out of ~10 containers. This didn't play nicely with our Docker network, leading to occasional downtimes and email issues.
• It didn't allow accessing premium features or creating an organization without purchasing a license directly from Bitwarden, making self-hosting rather useless.
• This was able to be bypassed with use of projects such as BitBetter (https://github.com/jakeswenson/BitBetter). We did use this, but that still required us to manually generate licenses for people.

bitwarden_rs has premium features enabled for everyone, you can create an organization without purchasing a license or asking us for a license file.

It's all self contained in one docker container, and plays rather nicely with our network. We've also fixed the email issues for both instances (that was mostly due to our messy network tho, which is now also sorted out).

And according to our early tests, it performs much better than Bitwarden itself, both in terms of actual performance and stability. If you had issues with it before, we recommend trying it out again.

Existing users

As the database in the backend isn't compatible with bitwarden_rs, we need existing users that want to preserve their data to follow these instructions:

• Login to bw.lavatech.top on a browser.
• Go to Tools –> Export Vault, pick “.json”, enter your password, download your file.
• Go to bitwarden.lavatech.top on a browser, register a new account, verify email, log in.
• Go to Tools –> Import Data, pick “Bitwarden (json)”, select the file you downloaded, hit “Import Data”, and wait for it to finish. This process may take several minutes. There's a potential that it might time out and give an error, however it will still add everything in the background. Please do not try to add it again, it will just add duplicates.
• Log out on any other device, extension etc you use Lavatech Bitwarden on, update domain to bitwarden.lavatech.top and login again.

Our old Bitwarden instance will be shutting down in a month (May 18, 2020), or when we confirm that all users have migrated, whichever is sooner.

Thanks for your interest, LavaTech Team

(Tags to jump to other related posts: #bitwarden)