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Craft relies by default on the mysqldump and mysql executables to backup and restore databases. The default backup command looks like this:

mysqldump […options…] {database} > {file}'

The problem is that, while mysqldump might be available in the system, PHP running under a web request doesn’t know where to find it because it’s not in any directories specified in the PATH environmental variable. This is true when running locally with MAMP. It’s also true sometimes on EC2 instances when running MariaDB on RDS.

For this reason, Craft provides two configuration variables for you: backupCommand and restoreCommand. You can write your own command with the full path to the mysqldump executable. For MAMP it might be something like this:

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqldump […options…] {database} > {file}

The thing is, Craft’s default dump command is really nice. It excludes unnecessary session, cache, and asset data. You can see how it’s built for MySQL in the Schema::defaultBackupCommand() method. What if you could just replace mysqldump with its full path and not have to roll your own command? That's what this module is for.

This is a module for Craft CMS, not a plugin available in Craft's Plugin Store. It is installed with composer on the command line.

Run the following command in the root of your project.

composer require samhernandez/craft-db-paths

Open /config/app.php, add the CraftDbPaths class as a module, and bootstrap it. Example:

return [
    'modules' => [
        'craft-db-paths' => \samhernandez\craftdbpaths\CraftDbPaths::class,
    ],
    'bootstrap' => ['craft-db-paths'],
];

Add any of the following env vars to your .env file. Here is an example for MAMP on a Mac with MySQL.

PATH_TO_MYSQL=/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysql
PATH_TO_MYSQLDUMP=/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqldump

If necessary, you can add paths for Postgres too.

PATH_TO_PSQL=/usr/local/bin/psql
PATH_TO_PGDUMP=/usr/local/bin/pg_dump

No configuration file is necesary, just env variables set in your .env or otherwise.