Automatically Back up WordPress to Google Drive WP-CLI Bash Script

by

Previously I have shown how to upload WordPress backups to Dropbox without a WordPress backup plugin. If your site isn’t that large than Dropbox’s free limit of 2 GB may suit your needs. However, if you have a larger site then Google Drive may be a better option since you get 15 GB of space on free accounts.

Thanks to the program gdrive it is possible to upload directly to your Google Drive via the command line. This means we can use the power of WP-CLI to backup our WordPress database along with tar much faster than WordPress plugins in PHP like UpdraftPlus. The script is hosted on github.

You will need shell access to your VPS or dedicated server like Digital Ocean to install the gdrive software.

Automatically Back up WordPress to Google Drive with Bash Script

Installation overview

  • Install gdrive so we can upload files to Google Drive
  • Test gdrive before we create the backup script
  • Create the Google Drive backup script and schedule it

Install gdrive

On 64 bit Linux for Ubuntu, Debian or CentOS this will install the latest gdrive. If you need other versions or CPU Architectures see here.

wget "https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B3X9GlR6EmbnQ0FtZmJJUXEyRTA&export=download" -O /usr/bin/gdrive

If you want to run gdrive as a regular user you can change the ownership of the program to that user.

sudo chown user /usr/bin/gdrive

Make sure the gdrive allows its owner to read, write and execute (7)

sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/gdrive

Now you can start the initial setup wizard by executing

gdrive list

You will get a URL that you need to follow in your browser.

Go to the following url in your browser:
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?access_type=offline&client_id=367226221053-7n0vf5akeru7on6o2fjinrecpdoe99eg.apps.googleusercontent.com&redirect_uri=urn%3Aietf%3Awg%3Aoauth%3A2.0%3Aoob&response_type=code&scope=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.googleapis.com%2Fauth%2Fdrive&state=state

You will get a popup to Allow GDrive and then be shown a verification code.
gdrive-allow-access
Enter your verification code from above and you will shown a list of the items on your Google Drive.

Enter verification code: 4/v641ZwmsTHGD9x8k3qXyp066x7PbOsL5ID0tgFyODFE
Id                              Name              Type   Size     Created
0B-zYdZ8Kfs5Zc3RhcnRlcl9maWxl   Getting started   bin    1.6 MB   2016-08-16 00:44:19

Test gdrive

Let’s create a backups folder

gdrive mkdir "backups"

You will get the ID of the directory which is necessary for uploading items into that folder.

Directory 0B-zYdZ8Kfs5ZQ0ZVUGtsRlEtT2M created

You can check on your Google Drive that the folder exists.

gdrive-show-created-directory

We are going to create a temporary file to test uploading with

cd /tmp
echo "test" > testfile.txt

Specify the folder ID of our backups folder we created a few steps ago, the --delete means we delete the local copy of the file.

gdrive upload --parent 0B-zYdZ8Kfs5ZQ0ZVUGtsRlEtT2M --delete /tmp/testfile.txt

get folder ID

Uploading /tmp/testfile.txt
Uploaded 0B-zYdZ8Kfs5ZbXRrbG9GXzBoSU0 at 5.0 B/s, total 5.0 B
Removed /tmp/testfile.txt

You can check your Google Drive to see if the file ended up there.

gdrive-show-created-file

This will get folder ID of the testfile. All files and folders have a folder ID so you can reference them in scripts for deletion.

I will be using this technique in the Google Drive WordPress backup bash script.

gdrive list --no-header | grep testfile | awk '{ print $1}'

Now it is time to create the Google Drive Backup Script for WordPress

Create Google Drive Backup Script for WordPress

Now we are going to create the bash script that will use gdrive, tar and WP-CLI

mkdir ~/scripts
nano ~/scripts/googledrivebackup.sh

This is the script, it runs in sequence to back up each WordPress installation and upload it to Google Drive.

In the DAYSKEEP variable you can specify how many days of WordPress backups you would like to keep, any older ones will be deleted from Google Drive.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Source: https://guides.wp-bullet.com
# Author: Mike

#define local path for backups
BACKUPPATH="/tmp/backups"

#define remote backup path
BACKUPPATHREM="WP-Bullet-Backups"

#path to WordPress installations, no trailing slash
SITESTORE="/var/www"

#date prefix
DATEFORM=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")

#Days to retain
DAYSKEEP=7

#calculate days as filename prefix
DAYSKEPT=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d" -d "-$DAYSKEEP days")

#create array of sites based on folder names
SITELIST=($(ls -d $SITESTORE/* | awk -F '/' '{print $NF}'))
#make sure the backup folder exists
mkdir -p $BACKUPPATH

#check remote backup folder exists on gdrive
BACKUPSID=$(gdrive list --no-header | grep $BACKUPPATHREM | grep dir | awk '{ print $1}')
    if [ -z "$BACKUPSID" ]; then
        gdrive mkdir $BACKUPPATHREM
        BACKUPSID=$(gdrive list --no-header | grep $BACKUPPATHREM | grep dir | awk '{ print $1}')
    fi

#start the loop
for SITE in ${SITELIST[@]}; do
    #delete old backup, get folder id and delete if exists
    OLDBACKUP=$(gdrive list --no-header | grep $DAYSKEPT-$SITE | grep dir | awk '{ print $1}')
    if [ ! -z "$OLDBACKUP" ]; then
        gdrive delete $OLDBACKUP
    fi 

    # create the local backup folder if it doesn't exist
    if [ ! -e $BACKUPPATH/$SITE ]; then
        mkdir $BACKUPPATH/$SITE
    fi

    #enter the WordPress folder
    cd $SITESTORE/$SITE
  
    #back up the WordPress folder
    tar -czf $BACKUPPATH/$SITENAME/$SITE/$DATEFORM-$SITE.tar.gz .
    #back up the WordPress database, compress and clean up
    wp db export $BACKUPPATH/$SITE/$DATEFORM-$SITE.sql --all-tablespaces --single-transaction --quick --lock-tables=false --allow-root --skip-themes --skip-plugins
    cat $BACKUPPATH/$SITE/$DATEFORM-$SITE.sql | gzip > $BACKUPPATH/$SITE/$DATEFORM-$SITE.sql.gz
    rm $BACKUPPATH/$SITE/$DATEFORM-$SITE.sql
    
    #get current folder ID
    SITEFOLDERID=$(gdrive list --no-header | grep $SITE | grep dir | awk '{ print $1}')

    #create folder if doesn't exist
    if [ -z "$SITEFOLDERID" ]; then
        gdrive mkdir --parent $BACKUPSID $SITE
        SITEFOLDERID=$(gdrive list --no-header | grep $SITE | grep dir | awk '{ print $1}')
    fi

    #upload WordPress tar
    gdrive upload --parent $SITEFOLDERID --delete $BACKUPPATH/$SITE/$DATEFORM-$SITE.tar.gz
    #upload wordpress database
    gdrive upload --parent $SITEFOLDERID --delete $BACKUPPATH/$SITE/$DATEFORM-$SITE.sql.gz

done

#Fix permissions
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data $SITESTORE
sudo find $SITESTORE -type f -exec chmod 644 {} +
sudo find $SITESTORE -type d -exec chmod 755 {} +

Ctrl+X, Y and Enter to Save and exit.

Now add the script as a cronjob so it runs every day

crontab -e

Enter this so the script runs daily (meaning midnight), you may want to use absolute paths to the script (e.g. /home/user/scripts or /root/scripts)

@daily /bin/bash ~/scripts/googledrivebackup.sh

Ctrl+X, Y and Enter to save and exit.

Now your WordPress or WooCommerce backups will automatically be uploaded to Google Drive without having to rely on a WordPress plugin.

Sources

Uploading files to Google Drive from Command Line