[ckan-dev] CKAN DB back-up

Wed Jul 13 16:54:23 UTC 2011

2011/7/13 Jindřich Mynarz <mynarzjindrich at gmail.com>:
> 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.

"paster db dump" was added by release 1.3.3, which your site is
running a beta copy of, but obviously just missed out.
http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1067

But it is merely a handy wrapper for pg_dump. So I suggest you use
that instead. Here's the format:
$ pg_dump -U <user> <db_name> > <dumpfile>

David

>
> 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
>