backup mysql database in php using mysqldump

Question

I have this code, that uses mysqldump to backup mysql database. The problem is I'm getting this fatal error:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in C:\\wamp\\www\\pos\\php\\backupdb.php on line 13

Line 13 is the final line.

<?php
$backupFile = 'c:\\onstor'. date("Y-m-d-H-i-s") . '.sql';
$command = "mysqldump --opt -u root -p onstor > $backupFile";
system($command);
?>

What do I do, I think the code is okay since I've tried it in command prompt and it worked. Is it bad that I have put the path to mysql/bin to the environment variables.

Answer 1

The problem, as the error message states pretty plainly, is that your script is running for too long. Scripts executing through a web server are not meant to run longer than a few seconds. You can change that using set_time_limit , but what you should really do is let long running scripts run from the command line. Since the only thing you're doing is running a CLI command anyway, just ditch the PHP wrapper completely. Make it a shell script if necessary. Run this shell script regularly as a cron job/Windows Scheduler task (or whatever the Windows equivalent is called).

Answer 2

Your code looks okay. Dumping is taking lot of time. that's all. Read this Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 400 seconds exceeded . Do what is written there first and then look for any problem in your code.

Answer 3

The message say you reached out the 60 seconds excution time.

You can change it using the set_time_limit function, ie:

 set_time_limit(120); // 2 minutes

but I don't know why you would try to use mysqldump in PHP, it seems dangerous to me.