Backup WordPress site to AWS S3 bucket

March 17, 2021 / Nirav Shah

How to Back Up Your WordPress Website to Amazon AWS S3 Bucket

In this blog, we are going to explain how to take a backup of WordPress site code and data onto an S3 bucket.

Prerequisites for Backing Up WordPress to AWS S3

• AWS account
• AWS CLI
• SSH and DB Access to WordPress Server

Step-by-Step Guide: Backup WordPress Site to AWS S3 Bucket

Step 1: Create an S3 bucket with a name: -backup.

Step 2: Create an IAM user with a name: wordpress-s3-backup-user and attach the following policy to this user.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:ListBucketMultipartUploads",
                "s3:AbortMultipartUpload",
                "s3:ListMultipartUploadParts"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::-backup",
                "arn:aws:s3:::-backup/*"
            ],
            "Condition": {
                "IpAddress": {
                    "aws:SourceIp": ""
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

Step 3: Create a Read-only MySQL DB user with SELECT permission on all WordPress DB tables.

To do so, connect to MySQL DB and execute the following commands:

CREATE USER ‘wordpress_backupuser’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ”;

GRANT SELECT ON * . * TO ‘wordpress_backupuser’@’localhost’;

Step 4: SSH to the WordPress server and install AWS CLI. And also configure the CLI with credentials created in Step 2.

pip3 install aws cli –upgrade –user

touch test-aws-access.txt

aws s3 cp test-aws-access.txt s3://-backup

Step 5: Create the following S3 backup script with a name: wordpress-s3-backup.sh

# MySQL Dump
mysqldump --single-transaction -u wordpress_backupuser -p -h localhost  > /tmp/wordpress-dump.sql
# Zip wordpress code
rm -rf /tmp/wordpress-code.zip
zip -r /tmp/wordpress-code.zip /path/to/your/wordpress-root-dir
dy=`date --date="-1 day" '+%Y'`
dm=`date --date="-1 day" '+%m'`
dd=`date --date="-1 day" '+%d'`
# Copy to S3
/path/to/aws s3 cp /tmp/wordpress-dump.sql s3://-backup/$dy/$dm/$dd/db/
/path/to/aws s3 cp /tmp/wordpress-code.zip s3://-backup/$dy/$dm/$dd/code/

Step 6: Setup Cron Jobs to take backup periodically with the following Cron expression:

#crontab -e

# Executes backup script midnight of every day.
0 0 * * * /path/to/wordpress-s3-backup.sh

Step 7: And Set Up an S3 bucket lifecycle rule to delete older backup data. This will help you with S3 storage cost.

Also Read – Step by Step Guide to Install WordPress on AWS for free