NestBackup

Backup a server to S3 using a short and simple config file.

The config file describes a list of steps to be ran. It can backup databases (PostgreSQL and MySQL), folders (e.g. application media), and send an email with the result of the backup.

All the backup commands are ran as shell calls (e.g. aws s3 ..., pg_dump ...), and each of these calls are logged, so what NestBackup does under the hood is transparent and the steps can be easily reproduced in a shell.

Configuration

NestBackup expects the config file to be in ~/backup.ini. It can be overriden using the NESTBACKUP_CONFIG environment variable.

Sections

Each section describes a job to be ran, and the backup is uploaded to hostname/section_name/[remote_path].

Available jobs:

• sync: Sinchronizes a path with the remote one. Uses s3 sync.
• database: Dumps the data of given database, compresses it and uploads it to the bucket. It supports mysql and postgresql.
• smtp: Sends an email with a report of the jobs that were ran.

The job field is a mandatory attribute for all the section, as is the one that determines which job will be run.

Example config file

[DEFAULT]
# The DEFAULT section contains the default values set to all the jobs
aws_access_key_id=app
aws_secret_access_key=12345678
bucket=backup

[media]
job=sync
local_path=/var/www

[db]
job=database
db_uri=postgresql://app:app@postgres/app
# db_uri=mysql://app:app@mysql/app
# keep 7 files, delete older ones
retention=7

[notify]
job=smtp
server=smtp.mailgun.org
ssl=yes
port=465
username=postmaster@mg.example.com
password=secret123
sender=Example Systems <postmaster@mg.example.com>
recipients=admin@example.com

Usage

Initialize a base config file in ~/backup.ini (overridable by NESTBACKUP_CONFIG environment variable):

nestbackup init

Backup:

nestbackup backup

Restore:

nestbackup restore

Cron example

  0 1     *  *  * bash -lc "nestbackup backup"

Installation

pip3 install nestbackup

Or you can checkout the repository and install it using setup.py:

git checkout git@github.com:jorgebg/nestbackup.git
cd nestbackup
python3 ./setup.py install

Or download it right to your /usr/bin/ folder:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jorgebg/nestbackup/main/nestbackup.py -o /usr/bin/nestbackup
chmod +x /usr/bin/nestbackup

Requirements

• Python 3.6+, but I'm successfully using it on machines with Python 3.4
• AWS CLI
  • pip install awscli