Configuring Backup Hooks

For many application workloads, additional processing or scripts need to be run before and/or after a backup is taken to prepare the system for a backup. Velero has support for this, using backup hooks. For more information, see Backup Hooks in the Velero documentation.

Some common examples of how a Hook can be used to create successful backups are:

Run pg_dump to export a postgres database prior to backup
Lock a file before running a backup, and unlock immediately after
Delete tmp files that should not be backed up

Backup hooks should be run inside the container that contains the data to back up.

Examples

A common pattern of applications is to include and want to back up a Postgres database. Postgres is easy to include from a Helm chart, and the following HelmChart kind can be used to configure Postgres for backups. An explanation of the configuration follows the YAML.

apiVersion: kots.io/v1beta1
kind: HelmChart
metadata:
  name: postgresql
spec:
  exclude: 'repl{{ ConfigOptionEquals `postgres_type` `external_postgres` }}'

  chart:
    name: postgresql
    chartVersion: 8.7.4

  values:

    master:
      podAnnotations:
        backup.velero.io/backup-volumes: backup
        pre.hook.backup.velero.io/command: '["/bin/bash", "-c", "PGPASSWORD=$POSTGRES_PASSWORD pg_dump -U username -d dbname -h 127.0.0.1 > /scratch/backup.sql"]'
        pre.hook.backup.velero.io/timeout: 3m

      extraVolumes:
        - name: backup
          emptyDir:
            medium: Memory
            sizeLimit: 1Gi
      extraVolumeMounts:
        - name: backup
          mountPath: /scratch

    global:
      postgresql:
        postgresqlUsername: username
        postgresqlPassword: "repl{{ ConfigOption `embedded_postgres_password` }}"
        postgresqlDatabase: dbname

  builder: {}

In this example, a few fields are worth explaining:

spec.exclude: this is a common and recommended pattern for applications. The customer can choose (using the config screen) to bring an external postgres instance instead of running it in-cluster. When this is set, we want to exclude the chart from installing.

spec.values.master.podannotations: here we add a few annotations to the postgres master podspec (not the statefulset, this will add the annotations to the podspec). The annotations are:

annotation	description
`backup.velero.io/backup-volumes`	a comma separated list of volumes from the pod to include in the backup.
Note, we are not including the primary data volume here
`pre.hook.backup.velero.io/command`	a stringified json array containing the pre backup hook command.
This command is a pg_dump from the running database to the backup volume
`pre.hook.backup.velero.io/timeout`	a duration for the maximum time to let this script run for

spec.master.extraVolumes: this is a new volume that we inject into the postgres pod. It's an empty volume, stored in memory (does not require a PVC or storage). We mount this into the /scratch directory of the master pod, and use it as a destination when running pg_dump above (in the hooks). This is the only volume that we will back up.

Examples​

Examples