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Drutopia Member Server Access
Agaric manages a large number of Drupal, primarily Drutopia sites on MayFirst Movement Technology infrastructure.
For clients that require or desire access to their instance in order to perform their own backups, we provide SSH access, which includes secure transfers via sftp, scp, and rsync.
Getting access
Access to your instance and data is made possible via SSH authentication. We only offer key-based authentication to SSH. This means you must create your own public/private key pair, and then provide your public key to your Drutopia administrator. (Once you have access via one key, you may modify the keys allowed as you need to by modifying your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.)
Directions for generating a key pair for various operating systems can be found in many places online (i.e. search "ssh keygen"). One example is at ssh.com. An example of other methods for Windows systems, such as Git bash are also available.
SSH keys come in pairs - a public and private key. Your private key is just that: private. It should not be shared outside your system. Common file names for this key are, for example: id_rsa or id_ed25519, depending on the type of key you choose to generate. The public portion is the one you share with the administrator, to be added to your account on the Drutopia host server. The public portion is typically suffixed with .pub, e.g. id_rsa.pub or id_ed25519.pub.
Logging in
Once you have a public key configured by the Drutopia admin, you are able to connect with ssh and sftp. SSH access enables you to get a remote terminal prompt on the server to issue commands, such as attaching to your database or running drush. Your Drutopia admin will provide your user name, and the host name will match your web site's address. The convention for instances on the site is that an <site>_test and <site>_live user exist for each, corresponding to that instance of your site.
For example, for a site called 'example.com', you might login using:
ssh example_live@example.com
Common operations (drush, mysql, backups)
Once you have logged in, the environment should be pre-configured for you to have quick access to your database and drush commands. Simply entering drush will list a set of commands available. Similarly, typing mysql will automatically log your into the corresponding database.
We'll perform the two most common operations - you can enter these commands as they are immediately after logging in via SSH.
A common task to perform at the prompt is to make a database backup, or to create a tarball (like a "zip file") of your files folder. This can be accomplished a few ways, but here's an example using drush to create the file backup_db.sql.gz in your home folder (indicated by ~):
drush sql-dump --gzip --result-file=~/backup_db.sql
If you do not have gzip on your system, you can omit the --gzip argument, but note the file may be significantly larger and take longer to transfer from the system. The file created in this case will be backup_db.sql (i.e. no .gz at the end). Linux and Mac systems should be able to handle gzip files (gunzip ). For Windows systems, you might want to try 7zip.
In order to create a single file called backup_files.tgz in the home folder, containing the full contents of your public/uploaded files folder:
tar czf backup_files.tgz files/
Once these have been created, you can transfer them via sftp.
NOTE: Please be courteous with regard to your use of space/creation of multiple backups on this server - storage space is somewhat limited, and currently quotas are not being enforced.
Transferring files
To transfer files locally, you can use a command-like client for scp or sftp. Here is an example using an sftp client, where ls command lists files, get is used to pull the file locally, and finally exit quits the session:
sftp example_live@example.com
Connected to example_live@example.com.
sftp> ls
backup_db.sql.gz backups bin config custom files logs site
sftp> get backup_db.sql.gz
Fetching /home/example_live/backup_db.sql.gz to backup_db.sql.gz
/home/example_live/backup_db.sql.gz 100% 27MB 2.9MB/s 00:09
sftp> exit
Or, more directly with scp, download the backup file to the current directory (as indicated by the .):
scp example_live@example.com:backup_db.sql.gz .
For Windows, WinSCP is an often-recommended graphical client.
As mentioned previously, rsync is also available for syncing to/from the server.
Note there is little direct benefit to syncing your ~/site folder, but this does contain the full code of the active installation. While you can theoretically do so, it is preferrable to work from your git source should you want to deploy your site elsewhere. Installations of Drupal on Drutopia are controlled in such a way as only certain builds of the Drutopia codebase can be installed - the contents of the site folder are not user-modifiable. ~/config and ~/site/themes/custom folders are sourced from your git repository during site install/upgrade by the Drutopia admin.