Making backups a part of your Forge deployments

If you are using Lar­avel Forge for you serv­er pro­vi­sion­ing and man­age­ment you might have noticed that there is a built-in back­up fea­ture that makes it easy to take data­base back­ups for your web­sites and apps.

We use these Forge back­ups specif­i­cal­ly to pre­vent against bad deployments. 

In the past we’ve come into sit­u­a­tions where a new deploy­ment has bro­ken our Craft install leav­ing us unable to restore via the Craft com­mand line. In these sit­u­a­tions it’s good to be able to quick­ly revert to an ear­li­er back­up via the Forge dash­board as opposed to stress­ing out over mysql or psql restore commands.

One approach here is to either keep a set amount of hourly back­ups or just take a man­u­al back­up as part of our deploy­ment process.

This isn’t ide­al . We might for­get to man­u­al­ly back­up or our hourly back­ups might not be suf­fi­cient if we’ve been mak­ing a lot of changes to the site before deployment.

A bet­ter approach would be to auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate a new Forge back­up when deploying.

Auto­mat­ic Deploy­ment Backups

Luck­i­ly, Forge has an API we can hook into to do exact­ly that. Let’s use this API along­side our deploy­ment script to cre­ate an auto­mat­ic data­base back­up on every new deployment.

Cre­ate API Access Token

First, cre­ate a new Forge API access token. Go to your avatar in the top right and hit Account fol­lowed by API:

Give your token a name and hit cre­ate. Make sure to take down the token now, as you won’t be able to see it again.

Cre­ate Back­up Configuration

Now cre­ate a back­up con­fig­u­ra­tion. Go to your serv­er and hit Backup in the side­bar. Enter your back­up details. 

For fre­quen­cy select ​“Cus­tom”. Unfor­tu­nate­ly you have to give Forge some sort of cron sched­ule. In oth­er words, there’s no way to say ​“don’t back­up unless I do it man­u­al­ly”. So we usu­al­ly cre­ate a cron sched­ule of 0 0 * * 0 which is once a week. 

Cre­ate Your API Request

Now we need to gen­er­ate the curl request that we’ll make to the API.

We need:

• Serv­er ID
• Back­up ID
• API access token
• API end­point
  

You can find the serv­er ID down the bot­tom of the dashboard:

And you’ll find the back­up ID on the back­up page:

The API end­point we want to use is the ​“run back­up con­fig­u­ra­tion” endpoint.

So let’s use all this to cre­ate a sim­ple one line script on our server:

Now add this to your deploy­ment script in Forge:

And you’re good to go. Now every time you make a new deploy­ment with Forge you’ll have a fresh back­up of your data­base to revert to if things go wrong.