Backing up and restoring a self-hosted Plausible instance

Posted August 14, 2021 with tags #docker

I’ve been using Plausible Analytics on this website for a few months now and I’m a fan for three key reasons.

They’re open source
They explicitly detail how they track web traffic in a privacy-preserving manner
Customers can self-host their own Plausible instances

Being able to self-host Plausible gives me ownership of the data it collects, but it also makes me responsible for storing this data and backing it up. I manage backups for my instance with several Ansible playbooks, but the same can be done with plain shell commands.

A self-hosted Plausible instance is run as a collection of Docker containers and volumes managed by Docker Compose. As a result, a full backup of each volume gives you a copy of all of the data you’ll need for a restore.

So let’s dive in! To start, bring down your running Plausible instance.

cd hosting # your clone of github.com/plausible/hosting
docker-compose down

With Plausible stopped, you can take a copy of each Docker volume. I do this by mounting each volume to a plain Ubuntu container and running tar, writing to a mounted directory on the host.

mkdir $HOME/backups/

docker run --rm \
    --mount "source=hosting_db-data,destination=/var/lib/postgresql/data,readonly" \
    --mount "type=bind,source=$HOME/backups,destination=/backups" \
    ubuntu \
    tar --gzip --create --file /backups/plausible-user-data.tar.gz --directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/ .

docker run --rm \
    --mount "source=hosting_event-data,destination=/var/lib/clickhouse,readonly" \
    --mount "type=bind,source=$HOME/backups,destination=/backups" \
    ubuntu \
    tar --gzip --create --file /backups/plausible-event-data.tar.gz --directory /var/lib/clickhouse/ .

To restore a backup, you can remove the old volumes and extract your tarballs into new volumes.

docker volume rm hosting_db-data hosting_event-data

docker run --rm \
    --mount "source=hosting_db-data,destination=/var/lib/postgresql/data" \
    --mount "type=bind,source=$HOME/backups,destination=/backups,readonly" \
    ubuntu \
    tar --extract --file /backups/plausible-user-data.tar.gz --directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/

docker run --rm \
    --mount "source=hosting_event-data,destination=/var/lib/clickhouse" \
    --mount "type=bind,source=$HOME/backups,destination=/backups,readonly" \
    ubuntu \
    tar --extract --file /backups/plausible-event-data.tar.gz --directory /var/lib/clickhouse/

All that’s left after this is to restart the Plausible containers. You may also want to pull changes from Plausible’s hosting repo and the latest Docker images.

# Optionally, update your clone and pull latest images
git pull
docker-compose pull

docker-compose up --detach

From here, it’s up to you what you do with your backups. I’d suggest moving them to an external store, whether that’s your machine via rsync or a storage service with your provider of choice.

Happy coding!