Duplicity Cron Runner

What?

This image includes Duplicity ready to make backups of whatever you need, cron-based.

Why?

Because you need to back things up regularly, and Duplicity is one of the best tools available for such a purpose.

How?

Installing every possible Duplicity dependency to support all of its backends inside an Alpine system that is very lightweight by itself, and a little job runner Python script that takes care of converting some environment variables into flexible cron jobs and sending an email report automatically.

Environment variables available

Apart from the environment variables that Duplicity uses by default, you have others specific for this image.

CRONTAB_{15MIN,HOURLY,DAILY,WEEKLY,MONTHLY}

Define the cron schedule to run jobs under such circumstances.

Possibly non-obvious defaults:

• Daily: 2 AM, from Monday to Saturday
• Weekly: 1 AM, on Sundays
• Monthly: 5 AM, 1st day of month

Hours are expressed in UTC.

If you define any of these variables wrongly, your cron might not work!

You can use online tools such as https://crontab.guru to make it easy.

DST

Where to store the backup.

Example: ftps://[email protected]/some_dir

EMAIL_FROM

Email report sender.

EMAIL_SUBJECT

Subject of the email report. You can use these placeholders:

• {periodicity} will be one of these:
  • 15min
  • hourly
  • daily
  • weekly
  • monthly
• {result} will be:
  • OK if all worked fine.
  • ERROR if any job failed.
• {hostname} will be the container's host name, including the domainname (a.k.a. FQDN).

EMAIL_TO

Email report recipient.

JOB_*_WHAT

Define a command that needs to be executed.

Check the Dockerfile to see built-in jobs.

JOB_*_WHEN

Define when to execute the command you defined in the previous section. If you need several values, you can separate them with spaces (example: daily monthly).

Check the Dockerfile to see built-in jobs.

OPTIONS

String to let you define options for duplicity.

OPTIONS_EXTRA

String that some prebuilt flavors use to add custom options required for that flavor. You should never need to use this variable.

SMTP_HOST

Host used to send the email report.

SMTP_PORT

Port used to send the email report.

SRC

What to back up.

Example: file:///mnt/my_files

TZ

Define a valid timezone (i.e. Europe/Madrid) to make log hours match your local reality.

This is achieved directly by bundling the tzdata package. Refer to its docs for more info.

Set a custom hostname!

Duplicity checks the host name that it backs up and aborts the process if it detects a mismatch by default.

Docker uses volatile host names, so you better add --hostname (and maybe also --domainname) when running this container to make profit of this feature, or add --allow-source-mismatch to OPTIONS environment variable. Otherwise, you will get errors like:

Fatal Error: Backup source host has changed.
Current hostname: 414e54ed20fb
Previous hostname: 6529bba0969c

Aborting because you may have accidentally tried to backup two different
data sets to the same remote location, or using the same archive directory.
If this is not a mistake, use the --allow-source-mismatch switch to avoid
seeing this message

Pre and post scripts

Add jobs through environment variable pairs. The order will be followed.

Using Duplicity

Refer to Duplicity man page, or execute:

docker run -it --rm tecnativa/duplicity duplicity --help

Shortcuts

You can use these bundled binaries to work faster:

• dup: Executes duplicity prefixed with the options defined in $OPTIONS and $OPTIONS_EXTRA (see above).
• backup: Executes an immediate backup with default options.
• restore: Restores immediately with default options. Most likely, you will need to use it with --force.

Testing your configuration

If you want to test how do your daily jobs work, just run:

docker exec -it your_backup_container /etc/periodic/daily/jobrunner

Replace daily by any other periodicity to test it too.

Prebuilt flavors

Sometimes you need more than just copying a file here, pasting it there. That's why we supply some special flavours of this image.

Normal (latest)

This includes just the most basic packages to boot the cron and use Duplicity with any backend. All other images are built on top of this one, so downloading several flavours won't repeat the abse layers (disk-friendly!).

Preconfigured to backup daily.

PostgreSQL (postgres)

If you want to back up a PostgreSQL server, make sure you run this image in a fashion similar to this docker-compose.yaml definition:

services:
    db:
        image: postgres:9.6-alpine
        environment:
            POSTGRES_PASSWORD: mypass
            POSTGRES_USER: myuser
            POSTGRES_DB: mydb
    backup:
        image: tecnativa/duplicity:postgres
        hostname: my.postgres.backup
        environment:
            # Postgres connection
            PGHOST: db  # This is the default
            PGPASSWORD: mypass
            PGUSER: myuser

            # Additional configurations for Duplicity
            AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: example amazon s3 access key
            AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: example amazon s3 secret key
            DST: s3://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/myfolder
            EMAIL_FROM: [email protected]
            EMAIL_TO: [email protected]
            OPTIONS: --s3-european-buckets --s3-use-new-style
            PASSPHRASE: example backkup encryption secret

It will backup automatically all databases except templates and postgres.

Check the postgres.Dockerfile file to see additional built-in jobs.

Docker (docker)

Imagine you need to run some command in another container to generate a backup file before actually backing it up in a remote place.

If this is your case, you can use this version, which includes a prepackaged Docker client.

See this docker-compose.yaml example, where we back up a Gitlab server using its crappy official image:

services:
    gitlab:
        image: gitlab/gitlab-ce
        hostname: gitlab
        domainname: example.com
        environment:
            GITLAB_OMNIBUS_CONFIG: |
                # Your Gitlab configuration here
        ports:
            - "22:22"
            - "80:80"
            - "443:443"
        volumes:
            - config:/etc/gitlab:z
            - data:/var/opt/gitlab:z
            - logs:/var/log/gitlab:z
    backup:
        image: tecnativa/duplicity:docker
        hostname: backup
        domainname: gitlab.example.com
        privileged: true  # To speak with host's docker socket
        volumes:
            - config:/mnt/backup/src/config
            - data:/mnt/backup/src/data
            - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
        environment:
            # Generate Gitlab backup before uploading it
            JOB_200_WHAT:
                docker exec projectname_gitlab_1
                gitlab-rake gitlab:backup:create
            JOB_200_WHEN: daily weekly

            # Additional configurations for Duplicity
            AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: example amazon s3 access key
            AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: example amazon s3 secret key
            DST: s3://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/myfolder
            EMAIL_FROM: [email protected]
            EMAIL_TO: [email protected]
            OPTIONS: --s3-european-buckets --s3-use-new-style
            PASSPHRASE: example backup encryption secret

Amazon S3 (*-s3)

Any of the other flavors has a special variant suffixed with -s3. It provides some opinionated defaults to make good use of S3 different storage types and its lifecycle rules and filters, assuming you want to have weekly full backups. You should combine it with lifecycle and expiration rules at your will.