Database Backups with Docker

The database has to be running to create/restore a backup. These examples show local examples. If you want to use it on a remote server, remove -f dev.yml from each example.

Running Backups

Run the app with docker-compose -f dev.yml up.

To create a backup, run:

docker-compose -f dev.yml run postgres backup

To list backups, run:

docker-compose -f dev.yml run postgres list-backups

To restore a backup, run:

docker-compose -f dev.yml run postgres restore filename.sql

Where <containerId> is the ID of the Postgres container. To get it, run:

docker ps

To copy the files from the running Postgres container to the host system:

docker cp <containerId>:/backups /host/path/target

Restoring From Backups

To restore the production database to a local PostgreSQL database:

createdb NAME_OF_DATABASE
psql NAME_OF_DATABASE < NAME_OF_BACKUP_FILE