Dreamhost Full Auto Backup (DEPRECATED)

You can read more from Dreamhost's Personal Backpus at http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Personal_Backup

Deprecation notice

This script is now obsolete. Dreamhost decided, for security reasons, not to provide passwords through the API anymore. I was depending on that to fully automate backups without the user having to do anything when adding databases and users to his/her account. So I decided to re-write this from scratch but with Python, in another effort to automate as much as possible the backup of mysql databases and user files in Dreamhost.

New: https://github.com/helderco/dh-auto-backup

Introduction

I needed a simple script to backup all my mysql databases and users on my dreamhost account.

With this solution I don't need to store here all my sensitive login for mysqldump, nor do I need to set up ssh public keys for passwordless connections, whenever I add a new user (or remove!).

I just have a passwordless ssh login set up from my main account to the backup account, and run the script from there as a cronjob.

The API key must be provided as an argument to the script. This is also to prevent storing sensitive data on the file.

I use PHP's SimpleXMLElement class to easily get my data from the API. That's where all the data necessary (including passwords), comes from. I also use an Expect script to remotely ssh into the other user accounts and rsync them from there.

So I don't need to do anything when I create/delete databases/users. This is the purpose of a fully automated backup system. The more automated the better. Very little configuration is needed.

Installation

It's very simple:

Activate your dreamhost backups user account;
Set up passwordless login between your main account and the backups server;
Create an API key with the following functions: user-list_users, mysql-list_dbs, mysql-list_users;
Create a folder for the mysql dumps;
Download the script and put it anywhere you want;
Create a cronjon to run daily.

Execution

Note that you can give the script any name you want. Also, make sure you provide a path to a PHP5 version.

You can check with:

$ php -v

And to find the location:

$ which php

If this returns what you need you don't have to provide the full path bellow, unless you're doing it from the panel's cronjobs.

At this time, on dreamhost, the path to PHP5 is

/usr/local/php5/bin/php

Method 1

$ /path/to/php -q path/to/script api_key

Method 2

Add this to the beginning of the file

#!/path/to/php -q

...then make it executable with

$ chmod u+x path/to/script

...and run it as

$ path/to/script api_key

Contribute

I'm interested in improvements, so be free to contribute.

Suggestions:

Make this simpler;
Create local mysql backup folder if it doesn't exist;
Improve Expect script to be smarter.

helderco/Dreamhost-Full-Auto-Backup