backup-ghost-site

Shell script to back up a Ghost CMS site (depends on gdrive-upload to upload to Google Drive). Has been running in production for more than a year.

Pull requests welcome.

Before Using

• Install zip (sudo apt install zip)

Set up gdrive-upload

• Open Node.js Quickstart and click 'Enable the Drive API'.
• Give your project a name, and choose TVs and limited input devices in the dropdown.
• Save credentials.json to gdrive-upload/src and in that directory run node client.js to set up your credentials.

Change defaults in backup.sh to match your site

• Change backupDir to the directory that backup-ghost-site is located in (e.g. /home/david/repos/backup-ghost-site)
• Change domain to the address of your site, e.g. https://davidlane.io.
• Change ghostImagesFolder to the path of your images directory (e.g. /var/www/ghost/content/images/)
• (Optional) Change backupName to customize the name of the backup archive

Tell backup-ghost-site where gdrive-upload is

• In backupToDrive.js, enter the path to gdrive-upload, for example: ...require('../gdrive-upload'). You can also use npm link to make gdrive-upload available globally.

Enter your Ghost login credentials in credentials.sh

GHOSTUSER="Your username here"
GHOSTPASSWORD="Your password here"

Using

Run backup.sh to manually backup (or test and make sure it's working).

To run daily, add it to your crontab. Mine looks like this (backing up every night at 3 am):

* * 3 * * /bin/bash /home/david/repos/backup-ghost-site/backup.sh > /home/david/repos/backup-ghost-site/cron.log

Backing up to something besides Google Drive

backup.sh uploads the backup with the line node $backupDir/backupToDrive.js "$backupDir/$filename". Change this to fit your needs (e.g. replace with something to backup to Dropbox or another server).

Technical details

Database backup

• Using curl, saves a JSON dump of the database from the /ghost/api/v3/admin/db/ endpoint.
• Calls stripDBTimes.js to strip values that change whenever we access the API
• Runs diff and to only backup when something has changed (e.g. a new or updated page). Currently clears values (last log in time, etc) for the first Ghost user - if you log in as someone else, you update stripDBTimes.js.

Backup images

• Maintains a copy of Ghost's images folder and uses rsync to sync images.
• Only includes images in backup if there are changes.