SSBak - sspak database/asset backup & restore tool for Silverstripe

SSBak is a backup & restore tool for Silverstripe websites, written in Go. It backs up the assets and database, and is heavily based on (and largely compatible with) SSPak. Unlike SSPak however, it does not require PHP, mysql client, tar, gzip etc to be installed as this is all handled directly within SSBak.

It currently supports Silverstripe 3, 4 & 5.

Why rewrite SSPak?

SSBak was written to solve the backup/restore size limitations of the original SSPak utility, and can largely work as a drop-in replacement for SSPak (see features and limitations). SSPak has a nasty file size limitation due to undocumented PharData limits (see 1, 2 and 3). I have personally experienced these issues with SSPak and archives over 4GB, which resulted in partial asset backups with no warnings or errors at the time of backup.

SSBak does not have these file size limitations.

More recently I experienced issues of SSPak saving empty databases due to issues such as mysqldump: unknown variable 'column-statistics=0' or client/server mismatched versions of MySQL and MariaDB. SSBak does not have these issues as it reads and writes directly to the MySQL database.

Features

SSBak is a self-contained static binary written in Go, and does not use third part utilities such as the MySQL client, tar, gzip or even PHP. It is fast, memory efficient, and provides the following features:

• Compatible with the standard *.sspak file format (non-executable tar files).
• Create and restore database and/or assets regardless of size.
• Optionally create or restore without resampled images (--ignore-resampled). Note: this skips most common image manipulations except for ResizedImages which are usually generated for HTMLText and cannot be regenerated "on the fly".
• SSBak does not use PHP at all (see limitations).
• Multiplatform static binaries (Linux, Mac & Windows).
• Checks temporary and output locations have sufficient storage space before doing operations (Linux / Mac only).
• Optional verbose output to see what it is doing.
• Shell completion (see ssbak completion -h).
• Built in version check & self-updater

Usage

SSBak - sspak database/asset backup & restore tool for Silverstripe.

Support/Documentation
  https://github.com/axllent/ssbak

Usage:
  ssbak [command]

Available Commands:
  extract      Extract .sspak backup
  load         Restore database and/or assets from .sspak backup
  save         Create .sspak backup of database and/or assets
  saveexisting Create .sspak backup from existing database SQL dump and/or assets
  version      Display the app version & update information

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for ssbak

Use "ssbak [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Installation & requirements

Download a suitable binary for your architecture (see releases), extract the make it executable and place it in your $PATH. You can optionally rename "ssbak" to "sspak" to use as a drop-in replacement for SSPak (see limitations).

If you need to programmatically install ssbak (amd64) to /usr/local/bin/ssbak you could:

curl -sL https://github.com/axllent/ssbak/releases/latest/download/ssbak_linux_amd64.tar.gz | sudo tar -zx -C /usr/local/bin/ ssbak

To install & compile SSBak from source: go install github.com/axllent/ssbak@latest (Go >= 1.14 required).

Environment settings

SSBak automatically tries to parse either a .env or a _ss_environment.php in your webroot to detect the database settings. You can however export (or override) any of the following values by exporting them first in your shell:

• SS_DATABASE_SERVER (required)
• SS_DATABASE_NAME (required) (supports SS_DATABASE_PREFIX, SS_DATABASE_SUFFIX & SS_DATABASE_CHOOSE_NAME)
• SS_DATABASE_USERNAME (required)
• SS_DATABASE_PASSWORD
• SS_DATABASE_PORT
• SS_DATABASE_CLASS (currently only MySQL supported & defaults to MySQL if unspecified)

By default SSBak uses your system temporary directory (eg: /tmp/ on Linux/Mac) to save and load the temporary files from your .sspak archive. You can override this path by setting the TMPDIR in your command:

TMPDIR="/drive/with/more/space" ssbak save . website.sspak

Limitations

SSBak is designed as a database & asset backup & restore tool, and is largely drop-in replacement for the existing SSPak tool. There are however a few differences:

• SSBak currently only supports MySQL databases.
• SSBak is written in Go which does not have any PHP-parsing capabilities (it uses regular expressions to extract the config). For all database dump & restore operations it requires either a .env or a _ss_environment.php file containing SS_DATABASE_SERVER, SS_DATABASE_USERNAME, SS_DATABASE_PASSWORD & SS_DATABASE_NAME in the root or parent directory of your website folder. You can however also export the required variables (see Environment settings).
• It does not support remote ssh storage, git-remote / install, or CSV import/export features from SSPak.

Issues & vulnerabilities

Issues and vulnerabilities should be reported via the Github issues tracker.

Contributing

Code contributions should be supplied in the form of a merge request, and forked from the develop branch.