Backing Up Data to Amazon S3

I decided I wanted to backup my database somewhere other than my server. All of my code is in git so the only thing that could be lost in case of server errors is the database. To start I wrote a little shell script to dump the database using mysqldump. I wasn't sure where to put the SQL file to keep it off-server. My first thought was to put it in git, which was easy to do in the script. So I updated the script to add the file to git, commit the changes and push the repo up.

After a bit more thought I decided that might not be the best way to do it. It worked fine, but my usual workflow is I make all changes locally and then push it to git and then pull to production - I don't make any changes on the production server unless absolutely necessary. While adding files to git that don't exist in my dev environment shouldn't really cause any problems, I thought there must be a better way.

So I decided to put the dump file into an Amazon S3 bucket. Laravel can use S3 as a filesystem, as documented here, but I had tried to use this before and not had much luck. I saw that Amazon had a PHP package to interact with S3, which is SDKforPHP, so I thought I would try that out. After a little bit more digging I found that Amazon also has a package specifically for Laravel, which is located here. That turned out to be the winner. As opposed to trying to read pages of documentation for Laravel's file system or the Amazon SDK, all I need was a few lines of code and I was up and running. As a note, this package keeps the Amazon Keys and Secrets in the .env file, which is a lot better than keeping them in the filesystem.php config file like Laravel does. If you are going to use Laravel's S3 filesystem I suggest you update the filesystem.php file to pull them from the .env.

Now that I was able to upload files to S3 from a browser, the next step was to create an artisan command that I could add to my shell script. The Laravel documentation for this was clear and easy to follow. The only problem I had was a typo that for some reason didn't throw an error locally, but did on my production server. Other than that this is tested and working.

I had considered using S3 for this site in the past, but decided not to since I had problems with the Laravel S3 filesystem. Now that I've integrated with S3 so easily I may revisit that decision.