Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Enable non-interactive backups by wiki admins

Proposed by Rob Kam

Proposal summary: Provide wiki admins with a non-interactive method for backing up wikis

Full proposal: Special:DataDump is too interactive - having to click once each for XML, files and managewiki files, then having to wait for these to be ready and be manually downloaded through the browser. The wiki admin (or privileged users) should be able to run a command from a batch file or shell script that fetches a backup of their wiki(s) XML and files. A bonus enhancement would for the admin to be able to download only the changes and merge them into the previous download.

Support

 * 1)  As Agent Isai and Rob stated, the API module will be used for this. However, it's not currently in a very user-friendly state, to the best of my knowledge. Would support making it more accessible. Thanks - BrandonWM (talk • contributions • global • rights) 10:39, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
 * 2)  It's easy to forget to take personal backups regularly, and given that it's possible for a wiki to lose all of its data as happened to many users recently, I think that the easier it is for wiki admins to keep their data safe from loss, the better. Dimpizzy (talk) 22:45, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
 * 3)  or to run a Python script from the command line. Rob Kam (talk) 23:58, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

 * 1) I fear this is beyond our technical reach at the moment. I would like to note that we do offer a DataDump API module so if any interested parties want to look into that, they certainly can. Otherwise, developing an entirely new shell script might not be feasible as we lack the manpower to create and maintain a brand new shell script. Agent Isai  Talk to me! 20:04, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * @Agent Isai How would one access this API? Dimpizzy (talk) 16:42, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
 * https://meta.miraheze.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=generatedumps — Preceding unsigned comment added by Agent Isai (User talk:Agent Isai • Special:Contributions/Agent Isai) 16:46, 31 December 2022‎ (UTC)
 * I'd meant in the above that the client runs the shell script. Rob Kam (talk) 20:13, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm building a python script for this right now. -- Void  Whispers 00:09, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Script demo available on my github. -- Void  Whispers 02:54, 2 January 2023 (UTC)