Restic Backup Docker Container

A docker container to automate restic backups

This container runs restic backups as one-off jobs and supports reporting to healthchecks.io

• Easy setup and maintenance
• Support for different Restic targets configurable through environment variables
• Support restic mount inside the container to browse the backup files

Container: ghcr.io/janw/restic

Latest

docker pull ghcr.io/janw/restic

Please don't hesitate to report any issue you find. Thanks.

Environment variables

The container is setup by setting environment variables and volumes.

• RESTIC_PASSWORD — Required. The password for the restic repository. Will also be used for restic init during first start when the repository is not initialized.

• RESTIC_REPOSITORY — Optional. The location of the restic repository. Defaults to /target, so externally mounted repositories (NFS, SSHFS, etc.) should be mounted at /target into the container. For S3, this should be s3:https://s3.amazonaws.com/BUCKET_NAME

• RESTIC_FORGET_ARGS — Optional.restic forget will be run when this is set with the given arguments after each backup. Example argument:

  -e "RESTIC_FORGET_ARGS=--prune --keep-last 10 --keep-hourly 24 --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 52 --keep-monthly 120 --keep-yearly 100"

• RESTIC_JOB_ARGS — Optional. Allows to specify extra arguments to the backup job such as limiting bandwith with --limit-upload or excluding file masks with --exclude.

• Of course other Restic environment configuration variables are supported as well.

Volumes

• /data - This is the data that gets backed up. Just mount it to wherever you want.
• /target - This is the default target repository to back up to. Just mount your repository there, or adjust the RESTIC_REPOSITORY variable if you require other means of connecting to the repository (S3, Backblaze B2, etc.).

Set the hostname

Since restic saves the hostname with each snapshot and the hostname of a docker container is it's id you might want to customize this by setting the hostname of the container to another value.

Either by setting the environment variable HOSTNAME or with --hostname in the network settings

Backup to SFTP

Since restic needs a password less login to the SFTP server make sure you can do sftp user@host from inside the container. If you can do so from your host system, the easiest way is to just mount your .ssh folder conaining the authorized cert into the container by specifying -v ~/.ssh:/root/.ssh as argument for docker run.

Now you can simply specify the restic repository to be an SFTP repository.

-e "RESTIC_REPOSITORY=sftp:user@host:/tmp/backup"

Backups in a Kubernetes CronJob

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: backup-to-backblaze-b2
  namespace: backups
spec:
  schedule: "@weekly"
  concurrencyPolicy: Forbid
  startingDeadlineSeconds: 300
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          hostname: k
          restartPolicy: Never
          containers:
            - name: restic
              image: ghcr.io/janw/restic:latest
              imagePullPolicy: Always
              env:
                - name: RESTIC_REPOSITORY
                  value: b2:my-backblaze-b2-bucket:k
                - name: HEALTHCHECK_URL
                  value: https://hc-ping.com/deadbeef-1234-1234-1234-123456789012
                - name: RESTIC_JOB_ARGS
                  value: --verbose

                # These should be put in a Secret resource instead!
                - name: RESTIC_PASSWORD
                  value: "my_super_secret_backups_password"
                - name: B2_ACCOUNT_ID
                  value: "abdc12039812039821098"
                - name: B2_ACCOUNT_KEY
                  value: "my_secret_key"

              volumeMounts:
              - mountPath: /root/.cache/restic
                name: restic-cache
              - mountPath: /data
                name: backup-data
          volumes:
          - name: restic-cache
            hostPath:
              path: /var/restic-cache
          - name: backup-data
            hostPath:
              path: /mnt/data-to-backup