Backing up your Laravel project to Backblaze B2

Ensuring you are regularly backing your project database and assets up can be a dreadful task. At the same time it is a perfect task to automate. The following five minute tutorial provides you with all steps needed to back up your project to Backblaze's B2 storage. B2 is a service similar to the Amazon product AWS S3. The main difference is the price: B2 offers unlimited storage for a few dollars a month.

Requirements #

As usual you will need a few things before getting started:

• An account with Backblaze or a credit card to register an account.
• A Laravel project with access to the code base as well as the environment configuration

Once you have these can get started with the seven steps below.

Steps #

• First step is to install the dependencies:

composer require spatie/laravel-backup bringyourownideas/laravel-backblaze

and add the BackblazeServiceProvider to your "config/app.php" file:

\bringyourownideas\Backblaze\BackblazeServiceProvider::class,

• Publish the spatie default backup configuration:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\Backup\BackupServiceProvider" --tag=config

It pays to check the config/backup.php file for more detailed configuration of the backup.

• Head over to Backblaze, log in and create a private bucket:

Please note: the bucket name needs to globally unique in the B2 systems. You might need to get a little creative to find one.

• Get the Backblaze API keys:

and click the "Create New Master Application Key" button:

• Add the bucket name as well as account id and application key to your .env file:

# B2 Bucket configuration for backups
B2_BUCKET='my_backups'
B2_ACCOUNTID='abcdefghijk'
B2_APPLICATIONKEY='1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd'

• Add the filesystem to the "config/filesystems.php":

'b2' => [
    'driver'         => 'b2',
    'bucketName'     => env('B2_BUCKET'),
    'accountId'      => env('B2_ACCOUNTID'),
    'applicationKey' => env('B2_APPLICATIONKEY'),
],

Once the filesystem is known to Laravel, go back to your config/backup.php-file and update the keys

• 'backup' -> 'destination' -> 'disks' and
• 'backup' => first entry of 'monitor_backups' => 'disks'

to your new filesystem 'b2'.

• Define your schedule in the "app/Console/Kernel.php" file:

/**
 * Define the application's command schedule.
 *
 * @param \Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule $schedule
 * @return void
 */
protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
{
    $schedule->command('backup:clean')->daily()->at('02:00');
    $schedule->command('backup:run')->daily()->at('02:30');
}

If you are running a number of applications it is recommended to offset the times to avoid high load on the server.

That's it. #

Congratulations, now your project should be configured to be backups every night at 2:30 am.

You can test the backups by running this command:

php artisan backup:run

After the backup you should be able list all backups:

php artisan backup:list

If you are testing this locally you will need to configure your local environment similar to the production environment of course.

Acknowledgements #

Special thanks to Paul Olthof, who has written the first version of the adapter. We have fixed some issues to ensure it's working correctly.

🙏🙏🙏

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Published 23 Mar 2020