Adding a human-readable timestamp to automatically generated files
Let’s say you are creating backups as part of a script, and you want each backup to have a human-readable timestamp.
Drush can be used to generate a backup of your Drupal site, and send it to a file:
drush cc all && drush sql-dump > /backups/backup-$(date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S').sql
This will create a file that looks like:
/backups/backup2014-09-17-08-53-41.sql
You might also want to include the git commit number in there:
drush sql-dump > /backups/backup--$(git log --pretty=format:'%h' -n1)--$(date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S').sql
This will create a file that looks like:
/backups/backup--8818eca--2014-09-17-08-57-57.sql
In case of a problem now you will be able to revert to previous version of your site in case of a problem with your upgrade.
- Revert your codebase to commit 8818eca (as per the example above).
- git sqlc < /backups/backup–8818eca–2014-09-17-08-57-57.sql