Blog Escape

Copyright © 2017 Bart Massey

Blog Escape is a database scraper for Drupal sites. It digs the content out of a site by scraping the database and deposits it in well-formatted static files, ready for deployment elsewhere. It was intended for my blog, but will try to rescue as much of the Drupal site as possible.

Drupal breaks all the time. I used it as my blog site for many years (Drupal 4 through Drupal 7), but eventually it got to the point where it would neither run nor upgrade. This software is my solution for getting my old blog content back. (Except — LOL — my Drupal install mysteriously started working again the other day, with no obvious intervention on my part. I'm still going to finish this project, though.)

Blog Escape is written in Python 3 and currently targeted at Drupal 7 MySQL content.

This is a work in progress. Its current functionality is minimal, and its design is still in flux.

How To Use

We will assume that the domain name of your sitename is drupal.example.org.

1. This software requires the Python 3 MySQLDB module. Install it from your distro or with pip3. It also requires the mistune Markdown parser, the bbcode BBCode parser and the phpserialize PHP deserializer, which can be installed in the same way.

2. You will want to create a fresh copy of the Drupal database, just to avoid accidents. This should not be necessary, but better safe than sorry. If you're not familiar with creating a MySQL database, you may want to look at the manual before you start.

   Create the database and user like this:

   mysql <<<'EOF'
   CREATE DATABASE example_database;
   GRANT ALL ON example_database.*
     TO 'example_user'@'localhost'
     IDENTIFIED BY "example_password";
   EOF
   

3. Create drupal-example-org.my.cnf with the username, database name and password.

   [client]
   user="example_user"
   database="example_database"
   password="example_password"
   

4. Use mysql-dump from your old database and then restore the dump into a new database using the config file you just created.

   mysql --defaults-extra-file=drupal-example-org.my.cnf <dump.sql
   

   Danger: your old Drupal database and the new one are probably both completely screwed up with respect to the MySQL utf8, utf8mb4 and latin1 encodings. Dig around in the excellent series of reference cards starting here to figure out how to get a copy of the database with Unicode preserved.

5. Find the files directory under your site directory in your Drupal installation. Copy it over and cd into it. Use mv -f images/* . ; rmdir images to get all the old nested images out. Hope that there are no name collisions between images with different content. You can also remove the files → . symbolic link if you have one and would like.

6. Run python3 blog-escape.py drupal.example.org.

7. Move the resulting site directory to the root of your new archive website. Adjust your webserver configuration as needed.

Useful Links

• Drupal 7 DB doc
• Drupal 7 DB content storage
• MySQLdb doc
• ATOM RFC

Status

See the GitHub Development Project Board for pending and completed development tasks.

Limitations

• Currently only works (read "has been tested") for Drupal sites that use a site-specific domain name for the root URL.

• Please see the GitHub Issues for other pending issues.

License

This work is made available under the MIT license. Please see the file COPYING in this distribution for license terms.