Laravel Protector

This package allows you to download, export and import your application's database backups.

Common usage scenarios

• Store your local database in a file
• Non-productive developer machines can download the live server database
• A central backup server can collect backups from multiple live servers

Feature set

• Download and optionally import databases from a server
• Import existing database files
• Export the local database to a file
• User authentication through Laravel Sanctum tokens
• Transport encryption using Sodium

Supported databases

• Protector only supports MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL databases at the moment.
• Source and destination databases are currently not checked. Please make sure you run the same software in the same versions to prevent issues.
• Because of different dump formats, pulling dumps from MariaDB and restoring them to MySQL will not work. The same of course applies to cross-database operations between MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Notes

• Enabling Laravel Telescope will prevent remote files from being downloaded, as it opens and discards the HTTP stream!

Table of contents

• Usage
  • Export to file
  • Import
• Setup instructions
  • Setup for storing the local database
  • Setup for importing the database of a remote server
  • Setup for collecting backups from multiple servers
• Migration guide from Protector v1.x to v2.x

Usage

Export to file

To save a copy of your local database, run

php artisan protector:export

By default, dumps are stored in storage/app/protector on your default project disk. You can configure the target disk, filename, etc. by publishing the protector config file to your project

artisan vendor:publish --tag=protector.config

Import

Run the following command for an interactive shell

php artisan protector:import

Importing a specific source

To download and import the server database in one go, run

php artisan protector:import --remote

When used with other options, remote will serve as fallback behavior.

To import a specific database file that you downloaded earlier, run

php artisan protector:import --file=<absolute path to database file>

Or just reference the database file name in the protector folder (default folder is storage/app/protector).

php artisan protector:import --dump=<name of database file>

To import the latest existing database file, run

php artisan protector:import --latest

Options

If you want to run migrations after the import of the database file, run

php artisan protector:import --migrate

For automation, also consider the flush option to clean up older database files, and the force option to bypass user interaction.

php artisan protector:import --remote --migrate --flush --force

To learn more about import options, run

php artisan protector:import --help

Setup instructions

Find below three common scenarios of usage. These are not mutually exclusive.

Setup for storing the local database

If you only want to store a copy of your local database to a disk, the setup is pretty simple.

Installing protector in your local Laravel project

Install the package via composer.

composer require cybex/laravel-protector

You can optionally publish the protector config to set the following options

• fileName: the file name of the database dump
• baseDirectory: where files are being stored
• diskName: a dedicated Laravel disk defined in config/filesystems.php. These can point to a specific local folder or a cloud file bucket like AWS S3

artisan vendor:publish --tag=protector.config

Local usage

You can now use the artisan command to write a backup to the protector storage folder.

php artisan protector:export

By default, the file will be stored in storage/protector and have a timestamp in the name. You can also specify the filename.

You could also automate this by

• installing a cronjob on linux
• running it when you deploy to your server
• creating a Laravel Job and queueing it

php artisan protector:export --file=storage/database.sql

Setup for importing the database of a remote server

This package can run on both servers and client machines of the same software repository. You set up authorized developers on the server, and give them the key for their local machine.

Installing protector in your Laravel project

Install the package via composer.

composer require cybex/laravel-protector

In your User model class, add the following trait.

use Laravel\Sanctum\HasApiTokens;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use HasApiTokens;

    ...
}

Publish the protector database migration, and optionally modify it to work with your project.

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=protector.migrations

Run the migration on the client and server repository.

php artisan migrate

You can optionally publish the protector config to set options regarding the storage, access and transmission of the files.

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=protector.config

On the client machine

Run the following command to receive

• the public key to give to your server admin
• the private key to save in your .env file

php artisan protector:keys

Your server admin will then give you the token and server-url to save in your .env file. Unless specified otherwise in your software, the .env keys are

PROTECTOR_AUTH_TOKEN=
PROTECTOR_SERVER_URL=

Do not give your private key to anyone and keep it protected at all time

See Usage on how to import the remote database.

Downloaded database dump files are stored unencrypted

On the server

Make sure that the server is accessible to the client machine via HTTPS.

When one of your developers gives you their public key from the previous step, you can authorize them with:

php artisan protector:token --publicKey=<public key> <user id>

You will receive the token and url to give back to the developer, who has to save them in their .env file.

The developer can then download and import the server database on their own.

Setup for collecting backups from multiple servers

You can develop a custom client that can access and store remote server backups. The servers can be different Laravel projects that have the protector package installed.

See the previous chapter on how to give your backup client access to all servers. The backup client will need an according user on each target server.

• All the backup users on the target servers will have the same public key from the client
• For each target server, the client will store the according url and token

See cybex-gmbh/collector for an example implementation.

Migration guide from Protector v1.x to v2.x

Likelihood of impact: high

• If your app does not explicitly require the laravel/sanctum package, upgrading Protector to version 2.x will also upgrade Sanctum to version 3.x. This will require you to follow its upgrade guide.

Likelihood of impact: low

• Access to the formerly public methods getGitRevision(), getGitHeadDate() or getGitBranch() is now protected. You now need to call getMetaData() and extract the information from the returned array.

Migration guide from Protector v2.x to v3.x

No breaking changes are expected.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email [email protected] instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Web Development team at Cybex GmbH - cybex-online.com
• Gael Connan
• Jörn Heusinger
• Fabian Holy
• Oliver Matla
• Marco Szulik
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.

Laravel Package Boilerplate

This package was generated using the Laravel Package Boilerplate.