BookStack Backup - Backup all your BookStack books

Supported Operating Systems:

• Windows
• Linux (tested on Debian 11)

1. Why?

This is a script that I wrote because I was just feeling unwell with all of my important notes being on exactly one server and managed by one application.

The notes I take are crucial for school, work, and other things, so it would be a horror to lose them somehow.

And because of that, I decided to make use of the BookStack API and just backup all my pages and books myself.

My opinion: BookStack is such a great application, and their API documentation is wonderful!

2. What do I need?

If you want to back up your BookStackbookss, you'll need the following things:

  1. A running BookStack application (of course).   2. A BookStack Token ID and Token Secret for your Account -> Bookstack public API docs   3. Python 3.9 installed (it was developed & tested with only Python 3.9)   4. Of course, you also need to download all used libs.   5. Enough space :)   That's it!

3. How to setup

It is not much, but you have to do some small steps to prepare the script:

1. Rename the .env.example file to .env
2. Fill out the .env file with your data

4. Execute the script

For executing the script, you'll just need to start the export_pages.py file:

$ python3 export_pages.py

5. Result

The script will save your pages in the following format:

absolute-path/exports/[file-type]/[book-name]/[page-name].extension

• filetype-file-type: EXPORT_TYPE-Variable; it sets the file type for your exports. Possible options are markdown, pdf, and plaintext.

• book-name: The name of your created books (e.g., "cooking recipes"))

• page-name: The name (headline) that you gave your page (e.g., "how to cook lasgana", etc.)

Now, if you follow the output of the script, you should receive messages with a structure like the following:

Successfully exported & stored file "[FULL_PATH]\exports\[FILETYPE]\[BOOK_NAME]\[PAGE_NAME].[FILE_EXTENSION".

For example:

Successfully exported & stored file "C:\Users\User\Coding\PyCharm\BookStack\Backup\exports\markdown\hetzner-dedi-documentation-services\mastodon-social-networking-alternative.md".

If you get error messages, check the .env file. If that doesn't help, feel free to open an issue.

6. What's next?

This script was just written for personal use, but I could imagine myself implementing the following extras in the future:  

• Possibility to back up the "complete" structure: shelves, books, chapters, and pages

• Backup of attachments, images, etc.    

• Backup of BookStack configuration    

• Maybe a more beautiful wrapper for the script? Idk, maybe an GUI?    

• Who knows...