Comments on: Dull questions for web development nerds

By: ramanan

ramanan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:23:36 +0000

I added more comments to that file, to break down what each step is doing.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:08:33 +0000

Heh… Some of it’s a little over my head, but it gives me a better idea of what to think about and look for. Thanks for posting!

I’ve been trying to learn more about Cron jobs as it is, mainly because I’ve got a lot of database information that I need to export on a fairly regular basis, and I’d love to set it up so it all gets emailed to me instead. All of my personal live sites, and all of my company’s sites, are hosted in the same Linux environment, so in each case it would hopefully just be a variation of the same basic Cron job.

Thinking about that makes me realize that I’m worrying too much about having two copies of the same database. One’s a live version, the other’s a development version, and what’s the big deal? But if I set up a regular backup Cron job in each case, then that could hopefully keep me caught up on the changes with a minimum amount of work on my part.

Food for thought. Thanks, Ram!

By: ramanan

ramanan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:52:33 +0000

You probably don’t want to use your production database for testing. You could in theory futz that up too if you are making changes to your site, or want to test posting new articles, etc. I was going to write up at some point how I back up funkaoshi.com, but basically you can use mysqldump to make a backup of your database, copy it to your local box, and then use mysql to overwrite your local copy with the exported database dump. And you can automate doing all that. On the Mac I use launchservices, on a Unix box you would use Cron, and on a Windows box there is probably something similar, some sort of scheduler.

Here is what the script I use to back up funkaoshi.com looks like. The reason I don’t have to enter passwords in that script is that I use ssh-agent to save my SSH passwords, and the database passwords are all in the mysql config file, .my.cnf. Hopefully this isn’t all wicked confusing.