Ruby script for subversion backups

My subversion backups are automatically created after a commit. I use the post-commit script to do this. In the hooks directory of your repository there is a file called post-commit.templ that explains how the post-commit script works. Take a look at it for more information about this.

The post-commit script is called with two arguments, repository and revision. These two arguments contains information you may want to use.

My backup script looks like this.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# post commit script for backing up the source repository

repository = ARGV[0]
revision   = ARGV[1]

# create dump file
date = Time.new.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
filename = "/home/peter/subversion-#{date}-r#{revision}.dump"
system("svnadmin dump /var/lib/svn > #{filename}")

# upload file
remote = "peter@allerhande:/home/peter/backup/subversion"
ssh = "ssh -i /home/peter/.ssh/rsync-key"
system("rsync -e '#{ssh}' #{filename} #{remote}")

It should be obvious that this is one of those script that is called secret software.

To create a backup, I first create a filename with the current date and the revision number. Then I use svnadmin to create a dumpfile with that filename. Then I use rsync to upload it to another computer.

More information about rsync can be found in my previous post.