How do I automatically backup db.sqlite3 file in Django App hosted on Azure Web Apps?

Question

I have a Django web application hosted on _________.azurewebsites.net

The folder structure is as follows:

- Github Repository
     - settingsFolder
     - app1folder
     - app2folder
     - manage.py 
     - web.config
     - db.sqlite3

I have Azure set up to where a push to my remote github branch causes Azure to sync the files with my Github branch to my /site/wwwroot/ folder.

Explicitly,

git push origin branch 

This causes a problem. Everytime I try to add changes to my website, using git push, the db.sqlite3 DOES NOT reflect the changes within the website environment. Thus, if someone were to save data to /site/wwwroot/db.sqlite3, then my github repository would be UNAWARE of the changes. Updating my github repository would take the OLD db.sqlite3 and reupload THIS OLD during a file sync between Azure and github. Consequently, the db.sqlite3 on /site/wwwroot/ gets overwritten and data would be lost.

One solution is to manually make backups by connecting to my /site/wwwroot folder, saving db.sqlite3, and replacing it regularly in my Github repository.

Is it possible to automate this? If so, what resources does Azure provide me to do so?

Answer 1

What you're doing is wrong in quite a few ways.

Firstly, your sqlite file should not be in version control. Your local db is just that, local; it shouldn't be deployed to production, for exactly the reason you're experiencing. Delete it from git and ensure it is in your .gitignore file.

Secondly, it's not really appropriate to use a file-based db in production. Sqlite is a great tool but as soon as you move to a real production site you need a real database. Apart from anything else, if you find you need to scale your site to more than one Azure instance, they will each have a separate copy of the database file, so data will quickly get out of sync. Use a real db like PostgreSQL; yet another benefit of that is that your host will take care of backing it up.