You can never back up too often. I’ve been bitten by WordPress bugs (both when upgrading the core or plugins, and I’ve had sites hacked at least once). I haven’t found a good, automated backup mechanism for WordPress that keeps old history and allows an easy roll-back to an older (presumably working) version. I’ve become a huge fan of Git in the last year, so I whipped up some scripts to do what I needed.
I’ll assume you’re starting with an existing WordPress install, and it lives on the filesystem at ~/www/blog, and that git is in your path.
$ cd ~/www/blog- create a new repo.
$ git init . - add everything.
$ git add . - make the inital commit.
$ git commit -m 'initial commit' - prevent access to the
.gitdirectory via http; create~/www/blog/.git/.htaccesswith the following contents:Order allow,deny Deny from all
I don’t recommend automating the backup of the WordPress directory; the files in there shouldn’t change automatically. Instead, I like to make sure there are no changes before upgrading the WordPress core, or a plugin, and then explicitly create a new commit with the changes immediately after an upgrade. I do these pretty granularly, so that I can roll back a single plugin.
$ cd ~/www/blog- ensure
git statusshows no changes - do your thing in the WordPress admin UI
- commit the changes:
$ git add -A && git commit -m 'automatically upgraded to WordPress 3.2.1'
I do automate database dumps, and I like the system I came up with. I create a new “orphan” branch in Git that contains only the database dump. This allows a single Git repository to have two completely separate trees, making it one logical entity containing everything you need to manage the WordPress instance. I keep these repository clones in a different directory, for security reasons.
Here’s how you set that up. First, create a script (I call itdo_dump.sh) to dump the mysql database to a file; it will also commit the dump after a commit. Collect the database name, username and password from wp-config.php, then put them into your script. Fill in the blanks from the sample below;
#!/bin/bash
# provide location of git binary, if it's not in your path
git=/path/to/git
# db info from wp-config.php
dbname="wordpress_db"
dbuser="wp"
dbpassword="rAnd0m^pa55w0rd"
cd $(dirname $0)
do_commit=0
if [ "commit" = "$1" ]; then
do_commit=1
fi
mysqldump
--skip-dump-date
--skip-extended-insert
--single-transaction
-h localhost
-u "${dbuser}" "-p${dbpassword}"
"${dbname}" > "${dbname}.sql"
if [ $do_commit -eq 1 ]; then
if [ ! -z "$($git status -s)" ]; then
echo -e "** autocommit **nn$(date) @ $(hostname)" | $git commit --all --quiet -F -
fi
fi
$ cd ~/db_repos/- clone the existing wordpress repo:
$ git clone ~/www/blog blog $ cd ~/db_repos/blog- create the new orphan branch:
$ git checkout --orphan wordpress_db - remove the wordpress files from the index:
$ git rm --cached -r . - remove the wordpress files from the directory:
$ git ls-files --other | tr 'n' ' ' | xargs -0 rm - remove the empty directories:
$ find . -depth -type d ! -path '*/.git/*' -empty -exec rmdir {} ; - move the dump script into place:
$ mv /path/do/do_dump.sh . - run the script the first time:
$ ./do_dump.sh - create a new commit containing the dump file and script:
$ git add -A && git commit -m 'initial commit on wordpress_db'
0 */6 * * * $HOME/db_repos/blog/do_dump.sh commitWhen run from cron, the dump script will automatically commit the changes to the local repository. I actually have a slightly different version of the script that also pushes the changes to a remote repository (so my backups aren’t all on one server), but that’s a little more complex.
Hopefully someone finds this useful!
