Backup MediaWiki Database

For textual data backup, the fastest way is to use "mysqldump". The more detailed instructions can be found in the following link:

To backup all the uploaded files, such as images, pdf files, and other binary files, you can reference the following Stack Overflow answer

In the PKC docker-compose configuration, the backup file should be dumped to /var/lib/mysql for convenient file transfer on the host machine of Docker runtime. Example of the command to run on the Linux/UNIX shell:

mysqldump -h hostname -u userid -p --default-character-set=whatever dbname > backup.sql

For running this command in PKC's docker implementation, one needs to get into the Docker instance using something like:

docker exec -it pkc-mediawiki-1 /bin/bash (pkc-mediawiki-1 may be replace by xlp_mediawiki)

Whem running this command on the actual database host machine, hostname can be omitted, and the rest of the parameters are explained below:

mysqldump -u wikiuser -pPASSWORD_FOR_YOUR_DATABASE my_wiki > backup.sql
(note that you should NOT leave a space between -p and the passoword data)

Substituting hostname, userid, whatever, and dbname as appropriate. All four may be found in your LocalSettings.php (LSP) file. hostname may be found under $wgDBserver; by default it is localhost. userid may be found under $wgDBuser, whatever may be found under $wgDBTableOptions, where it is listed after DEFAULT CHARSET=. If whatever is not specified mysqldump will likely use the default of utf8, or if using an older version of MySQL, latin1. While dbname may be found under $wgDBname. After running this line from the command line mysqldump will prompt for the server password (which may be found under Manual:$wgDBpassword in LSP).

For your convenience, the following instruction will compress the file as it is being dumped out.

mysqldump -h hostname -u userid -p dbname | gzip > backup.sql.gz