Gitea repositories and database

Introduction

Gitea stores the platform configuration (in the values repository), the workload catalog (in the charts repository), and user-created repositories.

The recovery procedure described here uses the application-level backup of Gitea, i.e. using the gitea dump command line. This includes a current SQL dump of the database as well as all repositories and data. However, Gitea documentation recommends different methods for restoring the database, due to potential compatibility issues.

A restore using this backup is advised if for some reason only Gitea has been affected by a severe operational event leading to data corruption or loss. It is also possible to restore the complete the database or single repositories. Be aware that after a partial restore there may be mismatches between the repository information and the database.

Retrieving backups

When uploading and storing backups in the configured object storage bucket, there is also a local retention of the backups on a local volume for one day. After the local retention has expired, archives can be retrieved from the remote storage.

Note that rclone is installed on the first time upload of a Gitea backup. If not present, it can be obtained from the releases page at https://github.com/rclone/rclone/releases/. Following variables such as $BUCKET_NAME or storage authentication are pre-configured in the container, so they do not need to be changed.

##
## In the local terminal
##
kubectl exec -it -n gitea gitea-0 -- /bin/bash

##
## The following to be run in the remote container
##

## If needed, obtain and install Rclone
mkdir -p /backup/.bin
cd /backup/.bin
curl -fsSL -o rclone.zip https://github.com/rclone/rclone/releases/download/v1.69.0/rclone-v1.69.0-linux-amd64.zip
unzip -oj rclone.zip
cd /backup

## Optional, not required if backup is available locally
.bin/rclone lsf gitea:/$BUCKET_NAME  # List files
.bin/rclone copy gitea:/$BUCKET_NAME/<backup-name>.tar.bz2 /backup/  # Retrieve file from remote

## Extract the backup
mkdir restore
tar xvjf <backup-name>.tar.bz2 -C restore
cd restore

Restoring a single repository

Repositories are stored in the mounted container path /data/git/gitea-repositories, with the owning user or organization as a subdirectory. To restore a single repository, find the backup in the backup's data/repos/<owner> directory and copy it over to /data/git/gitea-repositories/<owner>.

Note it is not recommended to restore the otomi/values repository with this method after restoring a full cluster.

## ... commands above to obtain and extract the backup
cp -R repos/otomi/charts.git /data/git/gitea-repositories/otomi/

Other assets

Gitea file assets such as avatar images are to be found in the data directory of the backup. Similarly, they can be copied to the /data/ subdirectory as needed, e.g.

## ... commands above to obtain and extract the backup
cp -R data/avatars /data/

Restoring the database

For restoring the database of Gitea, please refer to the platform database instructions.

Cleaning up

Remove any extracted files from the local backup directory to free up space. They are not removed automatically. Only compressed backups with the .tar.bz2 are cleaned up after one day.

cd /backup
rm -R restore