Scheduled backups

[adamburgoyne]

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Please provide a concise description of the problem that would be addressed by this feature.

Currently there doesn't appear to be a way of running a scheduled backup. You can run one from the UI but that's a disaster waiting to happen.

Please provide a concise description of the feature that would resolve your issue.

We all know the value of backups but how often do you manually create one... never. The ability to schedule backups which can then automatically be uploaded to a cloud provider would tempt me to move over my whole recipe collection.

Please consider and list out some caveats or tradeoffs made in your design decision

There are none.

Additional Information

• If this is accepted I'm willing to submit a PR to provide this feature
• If this is accepted I'm willing to help maintain this feature
• I'm willing to sponsor/pay a developer to do this work

[Kuchenpirat]

we always had the stance that it is best to use an external tool for backup functions.
Everything you need is in the mounted folder if you are using sqlite. If you are using postgres as database you have to backup that too.

If you do not want to use an external tool you could also use a script to create backups via the api which should be possible to be easily automated.

[adamburgoyne]

Whilst I don't share the same stance I appreciate that it's been thought about!

I'll take a look at calling the API to generate and pull backups. I think I'd prefer to trigger the backup process and upload the zip file to my NAS, that way if there's any db corruption that I don't spot for a while I'm not just backing up a corrupted db. Makes it a bit easier to pull an old version of mealie and just upload the file if something does go wrong at any point. Should be easy enough to knock up a bash script for!

[adamburgoyne]

Very easy in the end if you want to do something similar but requires a little manual intervention.

I added - ${NAS_MOUNT}/mealie-backups:/app/data/backups to my docker-compose file which maps the mealie backup folder directly to my NAS drive (which then has a delete policy on the backup folder).

I've then just scheduled a nightly cron job that calls a python script to send a POST request to the backup endpoint to create a new one, the response is checked and if successful HealthChecks.io is updated.

All sorted!

[Kuchenpirat]

Thanks for reporting back and glad to hear you sorted something out that works for you 👍

[chuckfy]

I've then just scheduled a nightly cron job that calls a python script to send a POST request to the backup endpoint to create a new one, the response is checked and if successful HealthChecks.io is updated.

All sorted!

Would you mind sharing that script?

[adamburgoyne]

@chuckfy I don't really like python but it seemed like a good fit for the job so I just asked chatgpt to knock me up a quick script. It's pretty basic but it does the job.

import requests

mealieBackupUrl = "http://ip:port/api/admin/backups"

payload = {}
headers = {
  'Accept-Language': 'application/json',
  'Authorization': 'Bearer blah'
}

try:
     # Send POST request
    response = requests.post(mealieBackupUrl, headers=headers, data=payload)

    # Check if response status code is 201 and error field is false
    if response.status_code == 201:
        response_json = response.json()
        if response_json.get("error") == False:
            print("Backup created successfully.")
            # Send the healthcheck ping
            requests.get("https://hc-ping.com/blah", timeout=10)
        else:
            print("Error in backup response: %s" % response_json.get("message"))
    else:
        print("Failed to create backup, status code: %d" % response.status_code)

except requests.RequestException as e:
    # Log ping failure here...
    print("Ping failed: %s" % e)

[chuckfy]

@chuckfy I don't really like python but it seemed like a good fit for the job so I just asked chatgpt to knock me up a quick script. It's pretty basic but it does the job.

Greatly appreciated!