What are the Connection Bridge files and how to download them?
Connection Bridge files are used to establish a connection between your shopping carts and make the data exchange possible. They are special access gateways that are completely secured by unique Security Tokens bounded to your personal account and provided by Cart2Cart. To work correctly, Connection Bridge folder needs to be located in your store’s root folder.
After creating a migration you’ll find yourself on the “Setting Up” Migration Wizard Step, where you’ll be asked to provide the URLs of your Source and Target shopping carts, and download the Connection Bridge files (only for self-hosted carts e.g Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, etc. For hosted shopping carts e.g. Shopify and BigCommerce, you'd have to provide additional API info instead).
This video demonstrates the procedure of the Connection Bridge installation for Magento. However, it’s as well applicable for all self-hosted shopping carts.
How to install Connection Bridge files?
The procedure of Bridge installation via FileZilla FTP client is identical for macOS, Windows and Linux users.
There are two ways to set up Connection Bridge - manual and automatic. By default, you’re offered to do it manually.
In case you are setting up the Connection Bridge manually:
1. Download Connection Bridge files. After you provided your Source / Target store’s URL, download the Connection Bridge. Save the zip file on your hardware and extract it.
2. Upload the folder to your Source / Target store via FTP. Whichever FTP client you are using (FileZilla, WinSCP, FileFTP, CuteFTP) enter the root folder of your store and paste the bridge2cart folder you extracted from the zip file previously.
3. Check whether Connection Bridge files have been installed correctly. Click the confirmation link to ensure you’ve set up Connection Bridge properly.
If you see this message “BRIDGE_INSTALLED” - Connection Bridge is working correctly and you can proceed with the next step of Entities Selection.
In case you choose the automatic approach:
Provide your FTP details - host, port (If it’s different from “21”), login, password and the path to the folder where your store is.
Overall, the fields should be filled in a way similar to this:
- Host: 10.4.5.24
- Port: 72 (or skip the field if your port is 21)
- Login: User
- Password: 555222
- Path:/path/to/your/store (or skip the field if your store is right in the “home” folder)
Troubleshooting during the Manual Bridge Setup
Q: I’m clicking on the link but “BRIDGE_INSTALLED” message does not appear. What shall I do?
A: Try re-uploading the Connection Bridge files and setting the following permissions:
1. 755 or 777 for "/bridge2cart" folder, depending on your server configuration (If you are using the popular FileZilla FTP client this task is easy to complete - enter the root folder of your store, right-click on the bridge2cart directory, select file permissions and set the necessary value)
2. 644 (if "/bridge2cart" folder permission is set to 755) or 666 (if "/bridge2cart" folder permission is set to 777) for "bridge.php", depending on your server configuration (open the bridge2cart folder, right-click on bridge.php select file permissions and set the necessary value) 
If you are using other FTP client, change permissions in the way that’s appropriate for it.
Q: Aaugh, it still doesn’t work!
A: No worries, we’re sure your issue is easily resolvable. Please, describe your problem in details and submit a ticket so that our Support Team could give you a hand.
Is it secure?
Connection Bridge exists for one purpose only - making the data exchange possible. By installing it you allow our service to copy, and by no means modify, the data you’d like to move to a target store.
With each Connection Bridge we provide a unique Security Token. Such measure will let no user, except you, access your source store database
Once the migration is done you can delete Connection Bridge.
