Backing Up / Restoring Self-Hosted Ghost Instance
Note: Follow-up to the previous blog post regarding Ghost's Data Structure.
Note: This blog post doesn't cover the most "optimal" way to backup and restore your data. This post overviews backing up and restoring the self-hosted Ghost instance. There are plenty of scripts/tools that can help you backup your data in a more efficient way.
Warning: Ghost was updated to 2.0. The content of this blog is not tested on 2.X releases.
Tested on self-hosted non-containerized Ghost 1.X, might not be suited in the future Ghost 2.0 release.
Backup Using Ghost’s Native Tool
Ghost includes an option to export some of your instance’s content into a (large) JSON file.
This feature is very user-friendly but doesn’t guarantee that all of your content will be backed up.
Export Content
To back up your data, navigate to the Ghost Dashboard > Labs > Export your content.
Resulting in a JSON file containing your data:
{"db":[{"meta":{"exported_on":1532812983681,"version":"1.25.2"},"data":{"app_fields":[],"app_settings":[],"apps":[],"brute":[{"key":"ymz9A0U3Tw7fLTdqMKCQoLfpnZjo19HSaVzbtct0pD
U=","firstRequest":1532805883312,"lastRequest":1532807549811,"lifetime":1532811149815,"count":2}],"invites":[],"migrations":[{"id":1,"name":"1-create-tables.js","version":"ini
t","currentVersion":"1.24"}
...
Import Content
Note: Ghost will notify you if it'll try to restore existing entries.
To restore your data, navigate to Ghost Dashboard > Labs > Import content, browse for your JSON file, and wait for it to finish importing.
Manual
We can back up content manually by copying Ghost’s data directory on the filesystem and backing up Ghost’s database.
This is more advanced and potentially destructive than using the built-in tool.
Backup Filesystem
Navigate to your Ghost’s installation directory and then browse the content subdirectory:
cd /var/www/ghost
cd content/
ls -ltra
# Output
total 32
drwxrwxr-x 2 ghost ghost 4096 Jul 14 16:48 apps
drwxrwxr-x 8 ghost ghost 4096 Jul 14 16:48 .
drwxrwxr-x 2 ghost ghost 4096 Jul 14 16:50 settings
drwxrwxr-x 2 ghost ghost 4096 Jul 27 07:19 data
drwxrwxr-x 2 ghost ghost 4096 Jul 28 00:00 logs
drwxrwxr-x 5 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Jul 28 18:46 ..
drwxrwxr-x 3 ghost ghost 4096 Jul 28 20:49 themes
drwxrwxr-x 2 ghost ghost 4096 Jul 28 21:33 images
Backup everything into a compressed tar archive and save it in a directory (in this case, it’ll be saved in /tmp/ and the name format will be Content-Month-Day-Year-HourMinutes.tgz)
sudo tar -caf /tmp/Content-$(date +"%b-%d-%Y_%H%m").tgz ./*
Verify that the archive contains all the relevant files
sudo tar -tf /tmp/Content-Jul-29-2018_0307.tgz
# Output
./apps/
./data/
./data/redirects.json
./data/vkhitrin-com.ghost.2018-07-27.json
./images/
./logs/
./logs/https___www_vkhitrin_com_blog_production.log.6
....
Backup Database
Make a dump of all the SQL commands needed to rebuild your database and save it to a file (in this case, it’ll be saved in /tmp/, and the name format will be ghost_db-Month-Day-Year-HourMinut es.sql):
mysqldump -u root -p ghost_prod > /tmp/ghost_db-$(date +"%b-%d-%Y_%HH%m").sql
# Prompt
Enter password:
Verify the content of the file:
cat /tmp/ghost_db-Jul-29-2018_0407.sql
# Output
-- MySQL dump 10.13 Distrib 5.7.22, for Linux (x86_64)
--
-- Host: localhost Database: ghost_db
-- ------------------------------------------------------
-- Server version 5.7.22-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION */;
/*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */;
/*!40103 SET @OLD_TIME_ZONE=@@TIME_ZONE */;
/*!40103 SET TIME_ZONE='+00:00' */;
/*!40014 SET @OLD_UNIQUE_CHECKS=@@UNIQUE_CHECKS, UNIQUE_CHECKS=0 */;
/*!40014 SET @OLD_FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=@@FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS, FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_SQL_MODE=@@SQL_MODE, SQL_MODE='NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO' */;
/*!40111 SET @OLD_SQL_NOTES=@@SQL_NOTES, SQL_NOTES=0 */;
--
-- Table structure for table `accesstokens`
--
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `accesstokens`;
......
Restore Content To The Filesystem From The Tar Archive
Navigate to your Ghost’s installation directory and then browse the content subdirectory:
cd /var/www/ghost
cd content/
Extract content from the tar archive (by default overrides files)
cd /var/www/ghost/content
sudo tar -xvf /tmp/Content-Jul-29-2018_0307.tgz
Restore Content To The Database From The Dump
You may be required to drop tables before restoring from a dump file.
Execute SQL commands from the SQL dump file:
cd /var/www/ghost/content
mysql -u root -p ghost_prod < /tmp/ghost_db-Jul-29-2018_0407.sql
# Prompt
Enter password: