archive_job

Archive Job

Description

The archiver is my method of performing periodic backups of application data. The general idea is that applications can write data to a dedicated directory in /var/spool/archive, and the archive server will rsync these files to a central location each night.

The archive_job role creates a systemd timer to perform an application's archive job at a given calendar interval. The archive command can be specified as an argv to pass to directly to exec(), or as a string to be interpreted by the shell.

Archive commands are chdir'd to the appropriate spool directory prior to execution, so it's safe for them to simply write files to their current working directory.

Variables

This role accepts the following variables:

Variable	Default	Description
archive_name		Name of the archive job
archive_description	archive {{ archive_name }}	Description of the archive job
archive_user	root	Unix user that executes the job process
archive_group	{{ archive_user }}	Unix group that executes the job process
archive_on_calendar	weekly	Systemd calendar interval for running archive job
archive_command		Command to execute (will be passed as-is to exec)
archive_shell		Shell command to execute

You should define either archive_command or archive_shell, but not both.

Usage

Example playbook:

- name: configure archive job for cupsd config files
  hosts: cups_servers
  roles:
    - role: archive_job
      archive_name: cups
      archive_shell: >-
        TIMESTAMP=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S);
        tar czf "cups-${TIMESTAMP}.tar.gz"
        --transform "s|^\.|cups-${TIMESTAMP}|"
        -C /etc/cups
        ./ppd ./printers.conf
      tags: archive