Borgmatic is a simple Python wrapper script for the Borg backup software that initiates a backup, prunes any old backups according to a retention policy, and validates backups for consistency. The script supports specifying your settings in a declarative configuration file rather than having to put them all on the command-line, and handles common errors.

borgmatic-binary builds a binary distribution of the three borgmatic binaries using PyInstaller; its purpose is to provide a simple binary installation option not requiring a full Python installation. It is similar to the stand-alone borg binary availble from the borg download page.

Binary versions for 64-bit Linux systems can be downloaded from the releases page; they track the official borgmatic releases. For other or non-Linux platforms, binaries can be build manually (see below), but require a working Python 3 installation.

Unpack the borgmatic-<version>-<architecture>.tar.gz archive and move the four borgmatic executables (borgmatic, generate-borgmatic-config, upgrade-borgmatic-config and validate-borgmatic-config) from the subdirectory bin to a convenient location somewhere in your PATH, e.g.:

tar -xvf borgmatic-<version>-<architecture>.tar.gz
sudo cp borgmatic-<version>-<architecture>/bin/* /usr/local/bin

When installing in a system directory, e.g. into /usr/local/bin (as in the example above), root permissions or using the sudo command will be necessary.

Borgmatic requires Python 3; therefore the build will fail if the default python has an older (2.x) version. The ideal setup is to work in a vanilla virtualenv for python3, in which pyinstaller is installed with:

pip install pyinstaller

The build process will install borgmatic into the current python environment. PyInstaller can make use UPX if it is installed; otherwise, the binaries will still be build, but require more space.

Note: With recent a recent version of pip, there seems to be a problem when trying to install packages into a virtual environment with --system-site-packages enabled; it results in an error message stating that

AttributeError: module 'setuptools.build_meta' has no attribute '__legacy__'

A workaround is to use

pip install --no-use-pep517 pyinstaller

for the time being. See this and this issue for pip and setuptools, respectively.

After cloning the repository, the following make targets can be used:

make            # Builds binaries for the current system file
make dist       # Creates the distribution .tar.gz file
make clean      # Cleans up binaries
make realclean  # Cleans up binaries and the downloaded borgmatic source code
make distclean  # Cleans up binaries, downloaded borgmatic sources and the distribution .tar.gz file

After a make, the binaries build are available in the directory borgmatic-<version>/dist; they will be removed by make clean.

If you find issues, please open a ticket on the issue tracker.