Automating MySQL backups to S3 using Laravel

Having already setup automatic S3 snapshots for Kibana, the next item on the list is to automate MySQL backups. There are a couple of services like Snapshooter that can do this but I prefer doing it on my own.

To automate MySQL backups to AWS S3 with Laravel, I'm using Laravel Backup package by Spatie.

Setup

• Install the package using composer require spatie/laravel-backup

If you see a similar error message like this, your PHP version is probably not supported by the package / dependencies. You might want to use composer require spatie/laravel-backup ^6

Argument 2 passed to Symfony\Component\Translation\Translator::addResource() must be an instance of Symfony\Component\Translation\mixed, array given, called in /var/www/html/vendor/nesbot/carbon/src/Carbon/AbstractTranslator.php on line 165

• To publish the configuration file, run php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\Backup\BackupServiceProvider" - this will create a file under config called backup.php
• Go to your AWS Console, create a new IAM User (you can see the steps linked on the Kibana guide) and add AmazonS3FullAccess to the permissions attached to the user.
• Grab the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• Create a S3 Bucket from AWS console (the bucket name goes under AWS_BUCKET and your default region under AWS_DEFAULT_REGION)
• On the config\backup.php file, under destination key, change the value of disks array to include s3

'disks' => [
    's3',
],

• Ensure that the default database is set to mysql

'databases' => [
    'mysql',
],

• Now if you run the command on your command line php artisan backup:run --only-db --only-to-disk=s3 the process should kick off and you should see similar messages.

Starting backup...
Dumping database database_name...
Determining files to backup...
Zipping 1 files and directories...
Created zip containing 1 files and directories. Size is 900 MB
Copying zip to disk named s3...
Successfully copied zip to disk named s3.
Backup completed!

• Once this is done, you can setup to run it using the scheduler on a frequency that you prefer. Go to your Console\Kernel.php and add an entry

protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
{        
    $schedule->command("backup:run --only-db --only-to-disk=s3")->weeklyOn(6, '7:00');

    //Other commands
}

Error messages

The problem was incorrect permissions assigned to the IAM User

Copying zip failed because: There was an error trying to write to disk named s3.

Copying zip failed because: Error executing "ListObjects" on....
AWS HTTP error: cURL error 6: Could not resolve host: