How to backup, restore and migrate

[unknwon]

Other than pack up gogs-repositories, data, custom and database separately, Gogs provides two commands for unified process of backup, restore and even migrate to another database engine, because the backup format is database-agnostic.

Prerequisite

• Gogs version >= 0.12.0

Backup

Go to the directory where your Gogs binary is located, and execute following command:

./gogs backup

Without any flags, backup command will pack up all gogs-repositories, data, custom and database into a single zip archive (e.g. gogs-backup-xxx.zip) under the current directory.

It could be a bad idea if your gogs-repositories contains GB of raw data, in that case, you can apply --exclude-repos flag:

./gogs backup --exclude-repos

If your custom/conf/app.ini is somewhere unusual, make sure you specify it via --config flag like always:

./gogs backup --config=my/custom/conf/app.ini

Database

If you're only interested in backup your database, or want to migrate from one database engine (e.g. SQLite3) to another engine (e.g. PostgreSQL), --database-only is your friend:

./gogs backup --database-only

The backup format of database are portable JSON files, each file corresponds to a database table, you can do whatever you want with those files.

Restore

The restore command also has flags to indicate only restore database or everything in backup archive:

./gogs restore --database-only --from="gogs-backup-xxx.zip"

If a table that is not presented in backup archive, whatever in current database table will remain unchanged.

Custom config file

There are 2 steps to determine which custom/conf/app.ini command uses:

1. Use the one you specified vis flag --config.
2. Use the one stored in backup archive.

If both steps failed, sorry, impossible to perform restore process.

[Loqova]

When running gogs inside a Docker container (named 'gogs' in my case) I use:

docker exec gogs bash -c 'ls /app/gogs | rm -f gogs-backup-*.zip && cd /app/gogs && USER=git ./gogs backup' && docker cp gogs:$(docker exec gogs bash -c 'readlink -f $(ls /app/gogs | grep gogs-backup-*.zip -)') . && md5sum $(docker exec gogs bash -c 'ls /app/gogs | grep gogs-backup-*.zip -') > $(docker exec gogs bash -c 'ls /app/gogs | grep gogs-backup-*.zip -').md5 && docker exec gogs bash -c 'ls /app/gogs | rm gogs-backup-*.zip'

This first removes old back-ups inside the container, then makes a new back-up inside the docker container, copies the file to the current location (outside the container) and removes the backup from within the container again. It also makes an MD5 hash of the made back-up.

Inspired by: #4339

[unknwon]

Thanks for sharing!

[Hser2bio]

thanks !

[whisperdancer]

I ran restore command with success. I checked the db and see it has restored the users and it has restored the repositories. However, I cannot login to my account. It returns error that username or password is incorrect. I checked the user table and see the users, but the password field is blank. Perhaps that's the issue. Shouldn't the restore operation restore user passwords also. Hoping there is a fix for this. Kindly advise. Thank you.

[urko-b]

same here

[whisperdancer]

Unfortunately, nobody on gogs offers to help so I ditched it. I moved over to gitea on docker and it's superior.

[zfrhv]

what i did for gogs helm chart:
in source pod:

kubectl exec -n gogs <pod name> -- bash -c "HOME=/data/git USER=git /app/gogs/gogs backup --target /backup"
kubectl cp -n gogs <pod name>:/backup/<file> ./<file>

in destination gogs (make sure its running 1/1):

kubectl cp -n gogs ./<file> <pod name>:/backup/<file>
kubectl exec -n gogs <pod name> -- bash -c "mkdir /data/tmp; HOME=/data/git USER=git /app/gogs/gogs restore --from /backup/<file> -t /data/tmp; chown -R git:git /data"