Today our team released a new major version of [laravel-backup][1]. It can backup the files and databases of your application to one or more external filesystems. It uses Laravel’s native cloud filesystem to do this. The package can also notify you via Slack and/or email when something goes wrong with your backups. We’ve also created a dedicated site with full documentation. In this blogpost we want to give you some background of why and how the package was created.

History

In the Laravel 4 days we ware using Johannes Schickling’s backup package to dump an application’s database and copy it over to S3. Then Laravel 5 came out. Unfortunately Johannes’ package was never updated. So… we had to create a backup package ourselves. Version 1 could simply dump the database. The next major version added functionality to zip specific directories and copy them over to external filesystems.

A lot of other developers found laravel-backup useful. A few weeks ago the package reached 40k downloads and 500 stars on GitHub. We thought this was amazing. It’s our most popular package by far. Creating a popular package was such an awesome experience that our team is now continuously releasing new open source stuff and helping the community.

In January of this year Jack Fruh of the Laravel News Podcast called to talk about the backup backage. You can listen to our conversation in episode 8 of the podcast. At a certain point Jack asks if the package sends out notifications when something goes wrong (it didn’t). That question led us to add monitoring functionality and notifications to version 3. Thanks Jack!

The package was one of the first Spatie packages that was ever released. In the past year we learned a lot, so we definitely could see room for improvement in the old code.

An overview of all functionality in version 3

Version 3 of the package has plenty awesome