Issues relating to backup/restore gitea

Install/Maintain/Configure
1

I’ve searched a lot both online, in gitea’s github issues, and in these forums for help, but none of what I had found had been helpful, so I’m not posting a new topic to get help from the community.

Information about the server: it’s running version 1.15.9 with the plan of upgrading this to the latest release (incrementally) after it is successfully restored to a new server. It’s running in Docker.

Steps to Reproduce Issue:

  1. The backup on the old server was conducted using the steps here
    Backup and Restore | Gitea Documentation

  2. Then the backed up gitea-dump-1699660123.zip gets created. I can download that to my desktop computer and it unzips without any issues.

  3. I rsync gitea-dump-1699660123.zip to the new server & that works fine.

  4. I run docker cp gitea-dump-1699660123.zip gitea:/tmp/ to copy the backup into the docker container.

  5. ISSUE #1: I open a shell in the docker container and run unzip gitea-dump-1699660123.zip which results in the following:

    Archive:  gitea-dump-1699660123.zip
unzip: short read

  6. I’m unable to get past the above ISSUE #1, so I try the same process on 2 different servers, which give the same result.

  7. I then try something new and unzip gitea-dump-1699660123.zip in a directory outside of docker and decide to docker cp everyhing such as:

    docker cp app.ini gitea:/tmp/
docker cp data/ gitea:/tmp/data
docker cp repos/ gitea:/tmp/repos

  8. I then run the restore process as outlined here Backup and Restore | Gitea Documentation

  9. ISSUE #2: This appears to work and users are able to login, but clicking on any repo gives an Internal Server Error 500.

  10. I then set RUN_MODE=dev in app.ini & restart the gitea server.

  11. Now when I click on any of the repos on the new server, I get the following error message:

    An error has occurred:

exit status 128 - fatal: not a git repository (or any parent up to mount point /)
Stopping at filesystem boundary (GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM not set).

  12. It’s not clear how to troubleshoot this issue, so I spun up a brand new VPS and got stuck again extracting the backup:

    bash-5.1$ unzip gitea-dump-1699660123.zip 
Archive:  gitea-dump-1699660123.zip
unzip: short read

Does anyone have any ideas on things to try to restore from the backup successfully?

2

bump as gitea just released a new version and I’m still unable to upgrade and need suggestions from others here.

3

Bump, bump, bump, bump, bump :grinning:

4

What is the docker based upon?
Is it alpine? If so are you using the REAL unzip or the function provided by busybox.

Busybox’s unzip has historically had this issue

5

Could it be a permissions issue? Are the files that you restore owned by the correct user?

6

I am following the official docker documentation here, which does not tell me what OS is running in the docker container, but cat /etc/os-release in docker confirms it’s Alpine-based. I did not realize it was using busybox for unzipping (checked /usr/bin and found unzip symlink to busybox).

I installed the real unzip and was able to successfully do this on two different servers. Thank you very much for your help.

1 Like
7

I’m having the same trouble. Mine is alpine-based too.

How did you install the real unzip?

8

You can install the unzip on Alpine with the following command

apk add unzip
9

Thank you!
Instead of unzipping the backup inside the container, I just did it on the host and moved the folders to the data mount path. This worked as well.

mkdir backup
cd backup
cp /path/to/gitea-dump-20240414-0018.zip ./
unzip gitea-dump-20240414-0018.zip
mv data/ gitea
mkdir data
mv gitea data/
mkdir data/git
mv repos/ repositories
mv repositories/ data/git/
sudo mv data/ /path/to/mount/
docker compose up -d --force-recreate
docker exec -u git -it gitea /usr/local/bin/gitea -c '/data/gitea/conf/app.ini' admin regenerate hooks
docker restart gitea

Hope this helps.