documentation/tools/drutopia-member-server-access.md

# Drutopia Member Server Access

Agaric manages a large number of Drupal, primarily [Drutopia](https://drutopia.org/) sites on [MayFirst Movement Technology](http://mayfirst.coop) 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 with sftp or scp.

## Getting access

Access to your instance and data is make possible via SSH authentication. We only offer key-based authentication to SSH. This means you must create your own public key pair, and provide your public key to your Drutopia administrator. Once you have access via a single key, you can add additional user keys that are needed. 

Directions for various operating systems can be found in many places online (search "ssh keygen"). One example is at [ssh.com](https://www.ssh.com/academy/ssh/keygen). An example of other methods for Windows systems, such as [Git bash](https://docs.joyent.com/public-cloud/getting-started/ssh-keys/generating-an-ssh-key-manually/manually-generating-your-ssh-key-in-windows) 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 names for this key are, for example: id_rsa or id_ed25519. 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 a _test and _live user exist for each, corresponding to that instance of your site.

For example, for a site called 'example.com', you would login to: 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, you can omit the --gzip argument, but note the file may be significantly larger and take longer to transfer off of 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 <file>). For Windows systems, you might want to try [7zip](https://www.7-zip.org/).

In order to create a single file called `backup_files.tgz` containing the full contents of your 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.

## 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](https://winscp.net/eng/index.php) is a good graphical client.