Backup and Restore

Introduction

To ensure this MediaWiki's content will not be lost, we created a set of script and put it in $wgResourceBase's extensions/BackupAndRestore directory.

The backup.sh script, convert all SQL database content into an XML file called: XLPLATEST.xml, and put all uploaded files into the images/UploadedFiles/ directory under the specified $wgResourceBase/ directory.

The restore.sh script, extract the content of XLPLATEST.xml, and reload all files of the images/UploadedFiles/ directory into the currently running MediaWiki.

Alternatively, the data set could be exported to a SQL file. Since that is running in a separate Docker service, the process will be discussed in a different page.

Importance

To enable proper data security, convenient backup and restore procedure would be the first layer.

This MediaWiki instance already stores all data under mountPoint/images and mountPoint/mariadb, these two directories store all the data relevant to MediaWiki, including its uploaded media files, and textual data stored in the MariaDB database.

Implementation

The default up.sh shell script is a way to allow users to kickoff the program. This process does the following tasks:

1. Before shutting down existing instance of docker services, it first asks the existing instance to backup the data.
2. Then, use docker-compose down --volumes to shut down all the docker services.
3. If the mountPoint/ directory does not exist, yet, decompress InitialDataPackage.tar.gz to the mountPoint/ directory.
4. When the mountPoint directory has the initial data content, start docker services, using docker-compose up -d
5. The docker-compose program reads docker-compose.yml file to configure docker services.
6. When the docker services start running, take the existing data in the directory, if images/UploadedFiles/ directory or XLPLATEST.xml are available, these data elements will be imported to the database.