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Restoring Databases

Note: gds-cli maybe installed and accessible via either gds-cli or gds depending on your installation. gds is also an alias belonging to github cli tools. In case of a Business Continiuity restore of the Production environmnet to the new AWS account, ensure that your Bastion server has at least 100GB volume provisioned and the Session database instance has 100GB of storage allocated.

The nightly database backups for each environment are stored in an S3 bucket for each Govwifi environment called govwifi--london-mysql-backup-data. The CO/GDS IT Infrastructure team also keeps an additional copy of these backups. In the event that we loose access to our AWS accounts, we can request a copy directly from the IT team. Databases can be restored from the nightly backups by following the instructions below (note: gds-cli may be aliased to gds):

Locate the gpg passphrase you need in the govwifi-build repo (for example the passphrase for staging is located here). Retrieve the secret using the following command PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=~/path_to_govwifi-build-repo-on-your-machine/passwords pass edit keys/govwifi-database-<environment-name>-s3-encryption-key

For example:

PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=~/path_to_govwifi-build-repo-on-your-machine/passwords pass edit keys/govwifi-database-development-s3-encryption-key

Locate the correct database file, e.g. staging backup files: gds-cli aws govwifi-staging -- aws s3 ls govwifi-staging-london-mysql-backup-data

Download the database backup file that you need, e.g. staging admin DB: gds-cli aws govwifi-staging -- aws s3 cp s3://govwifi-staging-london-mysql-backup-data/govwifi-backup-admin-2023-01-25-00-30.sql.gz.gpg .

Then upload the file to the staging bastion server in the eu-west-2 region, e.g.:

scp govwifi-databasename-datetime.sql.gz.gpg bastion.staging.govwifi:/tmp

Login to the bastion server and decrypt the gpg file: cd /tmp gpg --output govwifi-backup-databasename.sql.gz --decrypt govwifi-backup-databasenam.sql.gz.gpg

Unzip the file: gzip -d govwifi-backup-admin-databasename.sql.gz

Import into mysql (the database credentials are located in AWS secrets manager) mysql -u <username> -h <hostname> -D <databasename> -p < govwifi-backup-databasename.sql

This page was last reviewed on 15 June 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 15 December 2024 by the page owner #govwifi .