Your import file must include both any users that you want to import and any users that you need to reference in the import file in relation to other resources.
Users with an email address that matches the email address of a existing user will not be duplicated or updated. Users with an unmatched email address will be imported, but their account will be locked so that they must reset their password to login.
Linking objects to users
To link your resources to a user, you would specify a user id relative to the user’s id in the import file. So, if you have a user with id: 2 in your file, and a post with published_by: 2 that post will be set to be published by that user.
All users with unmatched email addresses are imported first. Once this is complete, the importer uses the relative ID from the import file to look up which user to link, and then uses the email address to find the correct user in the database. Therefore if you want to link objects to a user that is already in the database you can specify the bare minimum information for that user so that it can be mapped correctly:
"users": [{
id: 35,
name: "A User",
email: "user@example.com"
}]
If the importer is unable to find a reference for the user inside the import file, it will default to the Owner.
User Roles
All users are given the role of author by default. If you want to specify different roles, you can do so by providing a roles_users object, much like the posts_tags object. Please note that Ghost doesn’t yet support importing roles, so in this case the role_id is always relative to the id in the database, rather than in the file.
