Exporting data

Last updated 11th May 2021

Objective

Web PaaS aims to be a great host, but we never want to lock you in to our service. Your code and your data belong to you, and you should always be able to download your site's data for local development, backup, or to "take your data elsewhere".

Downloading code

Your application's code is maintained in Git. Because Git is a distributed system it is trivial to download your entire code history with a simple git clone or webpaas get command.

Downloading files

Your application runs on a read-only file system, so it cannot be edited. That means there's nothing to download from most of it that isn't already in your Git repository.

The only files to download are from any writable file mounts you may have defined in your .platform.app.yaml file. The easiest way to download those is using the rsync tool. For instance, suppose you have a mounts section that defines one web-accessible directory and one non-web-accessible directory:

mounts:
    'web/uploads':
        source: local
        source_path: uploads
    'private':
        source: local
        source_path: private

Using the CLI

The CLI provides a useful mount command for accessing mount data.

webpaas mount:list

Downloading a mount is then as simple as running the following:

webpaas mount:download

Using rsync

To use rsync to download each directory, we can use the following commands. The webpaas ssh --pipe command will return the SSH URL for the current environment as an inline string that rsync can recognize. To use a non-default environment, use the -e switch after --pipe. Note that the trailing slash on the remote path means rsync will copy just the files inside the specified directory, not the directory itself.

rsync -az `webpaas ssh --pipe`:/app/private/ ./private/
rsync -az `webpaas ssh --pipe`:/app/web/uploads ./uploads/

See the rsync documentation for more details on how to adjust the download process.

Download data from services

The mechanism for downloading from each service (such as your database) varies. For services designed to hold non-persistent information (such as Redis or Solr) it's generally not necessary to download data as it can be rebuilt from the primary data store.

To download data from persistent services (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or InfluxDB), see each service's page for instructions.

Get the environment variables

If your project uses some environment variable (tokens, ...) it can be helpful to backup them if you didn't store them separately.

As stated in the management console, several possibilities exist for the environment variables.

• Variables beginning with env: will be exposed as Unix environment variables
• Variables beginning with php: will be interpreted as php.ini directives.
• All other variables will be part of the environment PLATFORM_VARIABLES variable

You can access the content of the environment variable through the management console unless the --sensitive true flag was set.

In that case, you can run: webpaas ssh -p <project id> -e <environment> To access all the environment variables's values

and webpaas ssh -p <project id> -e <environment> "echo \$PLATFORM_VARIABLES | base64 -d | jq" to access the PLATFORM_VARIABLES's values.

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