Lee Willis

Backing up your Laravel app

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With a couple of Laravel developments out in the wild, I needed to make sure that they were integrated with my existing backup solution, which includes archived / off-server storage of backups. Pulling down the backups once I had them is pretty straightforward – everything is already set up to do that from the servers I use.

For WordPress sites, I usually use the BackUpWordPress plugin from the team at Human Made:

BackUpWordPress
by XIBO Ltd

BackupWordPress was created by our friends at Human Made but is now under new ownership. We’re committed to opensource and WordPress and will provide free support for the many BackupWordPress fans.
We’ll make occasional updates to the free software – please send us any patches you’d like to see released here: https://github.com/orgs/xibodevelopment/

However, we’ll no longer be selling or supporting the paid add-ons (e.g. for backups to Dropbox and Google Drive). It’s certainly a good idea to backup to cloud storage to protect against server-wide risks.
For this we recommend UpdraftPlus WordPress Backups which can do things for free BackupWordPress Premium could do on a paid basis. Click here for full comparison.

BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you. Try it now to see how easy it is!

This plugin requires PHP version 5.3.2 or later

Features

  • Super simple to use, no setup required.
  • Works in low memory, “shared host” environments.
  • Manage multiple schedules.
  • Option to have each backup file emailed to you.
  • Uses zip and mysqldump for faster backups if they are available.
  • Works on Linux & Windows Server.
  • Exclude files and folders from your backups.
  • Good support should you need help.
  • Translations for Spanish, German, Chinese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Lithuanian, Italian, Czech, Dutch, French, Basque.

Translations

We’d also love help translating the plugin into more languages, if you can help then please visit https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/backupwordpress/dev/ to start translating.

Stats:

  • Current version: 3.14
  • Rating: 94(1368 ratings)
  • Downloaded 4,845,304 times

For Laravel though, I was starting afresh. I found what looked like a good solution in the form of the Laravel Backup package from the team at Spatie. There were a couple of things I liked about the package:

  • It’s simple, straightforward, and does one thing (create backups) well.
  • It’s from a team who have a clear track record of delivering open source packages
  • From a look through the issue queue, it’s well maintained and open to pull requests from users.

A package to backup your Laravel app
https://github.com/spatie/laravel-backup
763 forks.
5,661 stars.
9 open issues.

Recent commits:

While I’m using it to back up to the local filesystem initially (backups are then transferred offsite separately by an existing system), the package allows you to put your backups onto any supported filesystem, so having it backup to S3, Dropbox, FTP, Rackspace cloud files or similar is just as straightforward.

I love the team’s concept of “Postcardware“, it’s nice as an open source author to know that your work is being appreciated, and used, and I hope they get plenty of postcards!

I have to say though, the real highlight in finding this package was finding Spatie and their broad range of Laravel packages – there’s at least one more that features in this series, and I can easily see myself using more of their packages in the future – thanks Spatie!

  1. Stuff I’ve used
  2. Error tracking with Sentry
  3. Autotrack for Google Analytics
  4. WordPress performance tracking with Time-stack
  5. Enforce user password strength
  6. WYSIWYG with Summernote
  7. Backing up your Laravel app
  8. Adding Google Maps to your Laravel application
  9. Activity logging in Laravel
  10. Image handling in PHP with Intervention Image
  11. Testing Laravel emails with MailThief
  12. Assessing software health
  13. IP Geolocation with MaxMind’s GeoLite2
  14. Uptime monitoring with Uptime Robot
  15. Product tours with Hopscotch
  16. Background processing for WordPress
  17. Using oEmbed resources in Laravel

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