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Driver

Driver is a database task-runner that helps you to turn production database into a staging/development database sandbox.

Description

Driver is the easy way to turn a production database into a staging or development-friendly database. It is built with the aim of complete flexibility. Additionally, with the built-in capability of working with RDS, Driver can run transformations on database host that is completely separate from your production environment.

Driver resides on your production machine, with your website's codebase (via Composer). You set up a CRON job to run Driver.

• Driver connects to your production database ONCE via mysqldump.
• Driver dumps that to a file on your system.
• Driver creates an RDS instance and pushes the database dump up to RDS (via https).
• Driver runs whatever actions you would like (configured globally or per environment).
• Driver dumps the transformed data, zips it and pushes it up to S3.
• You can then download transformed dump from S3 to your staging/development machine, also using Driver.

For a 3-5GB database, this process could take an hour or two. This depends on how many environments you are creating and what type of RDS instance you are using. This causes no downtime to the frontend thanks to the --single-transaction flag on mysqldump. Yes, it does take a while to run, but there is little-to-no impact on the frontend.

Before We Start

At Swift Otter we mainly work with Magento 2. We created separate repo for Magento 2 Driver transformations. It includes config for anonymization of all database tables of core Magento 2 system. If you are Magento 2 developer, we recommend you to install that repo, instead of this one (Driver would be installed anyway, as it is a dependency of that Magento 2 repo). If you're not a Magento 2 developer, we still recommend you to look at that repo to get a better idea on how things can be configured for your project.

Magento 2 Driver transformations repo can be found here.

Getting Started

Dependencies

• PHP 7.4 or higher

Prerequisites

You need to create an Amazon AWS account. We will be using RDS to perform the data manipulations. It is recommended to create a new IAM user with appropriate permissions to access EC2, RDS and S3 (exact permissions will be coming). This is explained in details here.

Installation

composer require swiftotter/driver

Configuration

Overview of Config Structure

Driver configuration goes into a folder named .driver. The files that are recognized inside this folder are:

• anonymize.yaml
• commands.yaml
• config.yaml
• connections.yaml
• engines.yaml
• environments.yaml
• pipelines.yaml
• reduce.yaml
• update_values.yaml

The filenames of these files serve no purpose other than a namespace. The delineation of the configuration happens inside each file. For example, in pipelines.yaml, there is a pipelines node as the root element. In this way, the YAML itself is providing namespaces. This also has the benefit for you of being able to put all of your updates in one file (for example, config.yaml).

Driver looks in quite a few places for configuration files. As an example, let's say your application is stored in /var/www/. Your vendor directory is /var/www/vendor/ and, of course, Driver's home is /var/www/vendor/swiftotter/driver. As such, Driver will look in the following locations for configuration files:

• /var/www/.driver/
• /var/www/vendor/*/*/.driver/

You can symlink any file you want here. Keep in mind that these files do contain sensitive information, and it is necessary to include a .htaccess into that folder: Deny from all

Connections Configuration

You have to configure connections information for your project. In the folder that contains your vendor folder, create a folder called .driver. Next, copy the file vendor/swiftotter/driver/.driver/connections.yaml.dist to .driver/connections.yaml and fill it in with your source MySQL information, as well as destination EC2, RDS and S3 data.

Exemplary config can be found in vendor/swiftotter/driver/.driver/connections.yaml.example.

Environments Configuration

Environments allow to make modifications to the database, per-site. You can configure different set of actions for every environment. For example, for local environment you may want to clear out all admin users as well as set unique URLs for the website and possibly other things.

Note: You can execute specific commands per environment. These changes do not revert for each environment, but rather they are applied according to their sort order. If one environment uses the data in the admin_users table, and another environment clears out all data in the admin_users table, you set the sort order for the first environment lower (ex. 100) and the sort order for the second environment higher (ex. 200).

To configure your environments copy the file vendor/swiftotter/driver/.driver/environments.yaml.dist to .driver/environments.yaml and fill it in with your environments data.

Exemplary config can be found in vendor/swiftotter/driver/.driver/environments.yaml.example.

Anonymization Configuration

Tables can be anonymized by creating anonymize.yaml file in .driver/. The following type of anonymization entities are available in order to provide realistic data and types:

• email
• company
• firstname
• lastname
• phone
• postcode
• street
• city
• ip
• general
• empty

Example File

anonymize:
  tables:
    quote:
      customer_email:
        type: email
      remote_ip:
        type: ip

Post-Anonymization Values Updates Configuration

Sometimes in your database you can store in a single field some value that was originally built by concatenating fields from different tables, eg. full_name or shipping_address. Driver allows to run some specific values updates after anonymization of simple fields is finished. Thanks to this feature you can anonymize such complex fields too.

To create post-anonymization values updates, create update_values.yaml file in .driver/.

Example File

update-values:
  tables:
    customer_grid_flat:
      joins:
        - table: customer_entity
          alias: c
          on: c.entity_id = customer_grid_flat.entity_id
        - table: customer_address_entity
          alias: ba
          on: ba.entity_id = c.default_billing
        - table: customer_address_entity
          alias: sa
          on: sa.entity_id = c.default_shipping
      values:
        - field: name
          value: CONCAT_WS(' ', c.firstname, c.lastname)
        - field: shipping_full
          value: CONCAT(sa.street, ', ', sa.city, ', ', IFNULL(sa.region, '-'), ' ', sa.postcode, ', ', sa.country_id)
        - field: billing_full
          value: CONCAT(ba.street, ', ', ba.city, ', ', IFNULL(ba.region, '-'), ' ', ba.postcode, ', ', ba.country_id)

Usage

Building Database Sandboxes For All Environments

Be prepared for it to take some time (on the order of hours).

./vendor/bin/driver run

Building Database Sandbox For Single Environment

./vendor/bin/driver run build --environment=envname

where envname is one of the environments defined in environments.yaml config file.

Tagging Database Sandbox

Sandboxes built with a tag will include the tag in the file name.

./vendor/bin/driver run build --tag=tagname

where tagname is an issue number (or whatever is desired).

Download and Import Sandbox Database from S3 to staging/local environment

The below command run the export/import pipeline which download the database into your project var/ directory, create new database in MySQL, and import the downloaded database in it for your environment.

./vendor/bin/driver run import-s3 --environment=envname --tag=tagname

tag is optional.

Contribution

We welcome you to contribute in Driver development. You can find some handy information for developers here.