Environment transferring hands ownership of an environment from one account to another on the same Stack Harbor PaaS installation. The environment keeps everything — topology, data, deployments, custom configuration — but the responsible account changes, and all subsequent charges go to the new owner.
Both sides confirm the transfer. The initial owner triggers the request; the target user accepts it. Until the target accepts, the transfer is pending and either side can cancel.
When transferring is the right tool
- You changed accounts and want everything moved to the new email.
- An employee is leaving and you need their work projects in a different developer’s account.
- A production-ready environment was built in a personal testing account and needs to land in the company account.
- You need to recover environments from an old deactivated account without reactivating it.
For cases that need the source and target to be on different installations, see export and import instead. Transfers do not cross installations — including between a main platform and its sub-platforms.
Conditions
Any environment (running or stopped) can be transferred from any account, including deactivated ones. The target account must satisfy a few requirements:
- Type — any account type except a trial account.
- Status — must be active. Suspended or deactivated accounts cannot receive transfers.
- Quotas — must have enough headroom for the incoming environment. Quotas checked include: cloudlets per container, nodes per environment, environments on account, and per-feature limits (public IP, VPS, HA, etc.) when those features are enabled on the transferred environment.
If a check fails at request time or at acceptance time, the dashboard surfaces the specific quota or feature that did not meet the limit and the transfer is stopped.
What happens after a transfer
No changes apply to the environment itself. The new owner inherits it in the same state, with the same applications deployed, with the same custom configuration. All future charges apply to the new owner.
The environment becomes unshared from every collaborator who had access to it. If the new owner wants the same collaborators, they need to be invited again from the new account.
Steps
- Open the source environment. Click Settings next to it.
- Navigate to Change Owner. Enter the email address of the target user.
- Send the request. Click Send Request. If the target account exists and meets the requirements, the dashboard confirms the request has been sent.
- Wait for the target user. They receive an email with a confirmation URL. While waiting, the environment appears with a special icon on the source dashboard. You can cancel the request at any time with Cancel Request.
- The target user accepts by clicking the confirmation link. The environment leaves the source dashboard and appears on the target account. Both users receive an email confirming success.
A final quota check runs at acceptance time. If the target account no longer meets the requirements at that moment, the transfer fails and both sides are notified — the source via email, the target via a dashboard error.