[ckan-dev] CKAN DB back-up

Wed Jul 13 16:46:02 UTC 2011

Hi,

thanks to David Read, I've got access to the Czech community instance
of CKAN running at http://cz.ckan.net. It's hosted at eu19.okfn.org
and it runs CKAN version 1.3.3b. First thing that I've tried was to
back-up the CKAN's database, so I tried the paster command:

$ paster --plugin=ckan db dump cz_ckan_backup.pg_dump --config=cz.ini

Which resulted in the following traceback:

/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/ckan_deps/sqlalchemy/engine/url.py:105:
SADeprecationWarning: The SQLAlchemy PostgreSQL dialect has been
renamed from 'postgres' to 'postgresql'. The new URL format is
postgresql[+driver]://<user>:<pass>@<host>/<dbname>
  module = __import__('sqlalchemy.dialects.%s' % (dialect, )).dialects
This functionality is mothballed for now.

I remember seeing the same error when David tried to back-up the CKAN
DB in this way, however I don't know how he resolved it. So my
question is how can you back-up your CKAN's DB to an SQL dump? Is this
issue with the paster command fixed in the newer versions of CKAN? Is
there an alternative approach for backing up CKAN's database? Is the
back-up process documented somewhere?

Cheers,

Jindrich Mynarz