Snapshotar

Make a snapshot of your staging environment and pull back on your dev machine.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'snapshotar'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install snapshotar

Run install generator:

$ rails generate snapshotar:install

Lookup config/initializers/snapshotar.rb and configure snapshotar.

What snapshotar can...

1. serializing your rails models to json
2. handling carrierwave attachments
3. storing serialized dataset locally or to amazon s3
4. listing available snapshots
5. deserialize snapshot and load back to database

Why snapshotar?

instead of...

• database backup? Because image attachments causing trouble!!
• fixtures/factories/fakers? Because this requires coding. Don't spend time coding test data - it's boring.

When to use snapshotar?

• For testing and development!!
• definitely NOT for production backups

Requirements

• Ruby >= 1.9.3
• tested with Mongoid, but ActiveRecord should work as well.

Usage

rake

rake snapshotar:create                    # create snapshots
rake snapshotar:delete                    # delete snapshots
rake snapshotar:list                      # list available snapshots
rake snapshotar:load                      # load snapshots

controller action

You can also integrate snapshotar into your administration backend and let app users create snapshots. A sample controller is provided below

app/controllers/admin/snapshots_controller.rb

class Admin::SnapshotsController < Admin::AdminController

  def index
    @snapshots = Snapshotar.list
  end

  def load
    Mongoid.purge!
    Snapshotar.load(params[:name])
    redirect_to admin_snapshots_path
  end

  def new
  end

  def create
    Snapshotar.create
    redirect_to admin_snapshots_path
  end

  def delete
    Snapshotar.delete(params[:name])
    redirect_to admin_snapshots_path
  end
end

Configuration Options

For AWS S3, you have to provide the following ENV variables provisioning your S3 bucket. For development environments look at this wonderful dot-env gem https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv.

config/initializers/snapshotar.rb

Snapshotar.configure do |config|
  config.storage_type = :s3

  # serialization
  config.models << [<ModelName>, <Attribute1 Symbol>, <Attribute2 Symbol>, :id, :name]

  # shorter ...
  config.models << ([User] + User.fields.keys.map { |x| x.to_sym })

end


AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<your id>
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<your secret>
AWS_SNAPSHOTAR_BUCKET=<a bucket name>
AWS_REGION=<e.g. eu-central-1>

Files

config.storage_type = :file

Snapshots are stored in the rails tmp/ directory

Testing

This repository is under continuous integration testing on travis-ci.org.

Amazon S3 related functionalities are not tested in CI as an official account at amazon would be required. AWS S3 tests can be run locally by providing a .env file in the projects root directory with the following keys:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<your id>
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<your secret>
AWS_SNAPSHOTAR_BUCKET=<a bucket name>
AWS_REGION=<e.g. eu-central-1>

RACK_ENV=test

S3_ENABLED=true

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request