Lu Tze

We all know backups are important. However, they’re often annoying. So, Lu Tze is a service for automating database backups. It sends an SQL dump of your database off to a remote backup service (Historian). It’s been built to work just on Heroku (so PostgreSQL only), although there’s potential for it to expand later down the track.

At this point, I’ve not open-sourced Historian, so while you can look at this side of the code, it’s not particularly useful. I’m planning to provide a better overview soon, though.

Installation and Usage

Firstly, you’ll want to add Lu Tze as a gem requirement – when you’re using Bundler (probably with Rails 3), that’s a piece of cake with a single line in your Gemfile:

gem 'lu-tze', '0.2.0', :require => 'lu_tze'

For those using Rails 2.x, it’s slightly more complicated – you need it in both config/environment.rb:

config.gem 'lu-tze', :version => '0.2.0', :lib => 'lu_tze'

… and then add it to the .gems file that Heroku expects:

lu-tze --version 0.2.0

Heroku’s free daily cron job is all that’s needed to put it all together – I use something like the following in lib/tasks/cron.rake:

task :cron => :environment do
  LuTze.gather_and_send
end

Lu Tze

Installation and Usage

Copyright