Backup a server and re-create it using the backup

This example demonstrates how to backup a server with upctl and use the created backup to re-create the server.

To keep track of resources created during this example, we will use common prefix in all resource names.

prefix=example-upctl-backup-

We will first create a ssh-key into the current working directory for configuring an nginx server via SSH connection.

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -q -f "./id_ed25519" -N "" -C "upctl example"

We will then create a server with a single network interface and default template settings.

upctl server create \
    --hostname ${prefix}source-server \
    --zone pl-waw1 \
    --ssh-keys ./id_ed25519.pub \
    --network type=public \
    --wait

To have something to backup, we will install a nginx server and configure a non-default HTML content to serve.

#!/bin/sh -xe

apt install nginx -y
echo "Hello from $(hostname)"'!' > /var/www/html/index.html

To configure the server, we will parse the public IP of the server and run the above script using SSH connection. We can then use curl to ensure that the HTTP server serves the content we defined.

# Parse public IP of the server with jq
ip=$(upctl server show ${prefix}source-server -o json | jq -r '.networking.interfaces[] | select(.type == "public") | .ip_addresses[0].address')

# Wait for a moment for the ssh server to become available
sleep 30

# Run the script defined above
ssh -i id_ed25519 -o StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new root@$ip "sh" < configure-nginx.sh

# Validate HTTP server response
test "$(curl -s $ip)" = 'Hello from example-upctl-backup-source-server!'

We will then backup the OS disk of the created server.

upctl storage backup create ${prefix}source-server-OS --title ${prefix}source-server-backup

After creating the backup, we can delete the source server and its storages.

upctl server stop --type hard --wait ${prefix}source-server
upctl server delete ${prefix}source-server --delete-storages

We can then create a new server based on the backup of the source servers disk.

upctl server create \
    --hostname ${prefix}restored-server \
    --zone pl-waw1 \
    --ssh-keys ./id_ed25519.pub \
    --network type=public \
    --storage action=clone,storage=${prefix}source-server-backup \
    --wait

To validate that the server was re-created successfully, we will parse the public IP of the server and use curl to see that the HTTP server is running.

# Parse public IP of the server with jq
ip=$(upctl server show ${prefix}restored-server -o json | jq -r '.networking.interfaces[] | select(.type == "public") | .ip_addresses[0].address')

# Wait until server returns expected response
for i in $(seq 1 9); do
    test "$(curl -s $ip)" = 'Hello from example-upctl-backup-source-server!' && break || true;
    sleep 15;
done;

Finally, we can cleanup the created resources.

# Delete the restored server and its storages
upctl server stop --type hard --wait ${prefix}restored-server
upctl server delete ${prefix}restored-server --delete-storages

# Delete the backup
upctl storage delete ${prefix}source-server-backup