dbmgr is a command line tool for backing up and restoring databases. It’s a useful tool for:
- Sharing databases between developers
- Provisioning new Vagrant vms and Docker images
- Provisioning new developers with a working database
When we first moved over to docker for hosting and developing our various microservices, I found myself constantly losing my database volumes. Every time this happened I would have to recreate and reseed my database and it started costing me too much time.
The first, and quickest, solution I thought of, was just to write some shell scripts
to quickly back up and restore my database. This helped a ton, but eventually I figured out that
the reason I kept losing my volumes, was because I was running docker-compose down on all my
containers. When you do this with a MySQL container, it destroys your database volume (oops!).
Later, I realized these scripts were super helpful for saving off a copy of my database to give to another developer to restore from when they lose their database or they need to work from a specific database state. It’s also really helpful for setting up new developers with a working database, but that happens much less often.
I eventually got around to porting my bash functions into a ruby gem and configuring a homebrew
formula to install from. Now I have a nice CLI that can be installed with a simple brew install dbmgr.