This is a little project, built in an evening, that allows you to download the latest backup that's stored on a UniFi Controller.
Behind every new project there's a story. In this case, a user of a UniFi UDM (not me) managed to completely reset their UniFi Controller during an internet outage. As nobody (including myself) had cared to manually download at least the latest backup, many hours of configuration were lost.
Thus the idea to create a simple script to download UniFi Backups was born. And as most solutions proposed invoke SSH access to UDM or require you to hand over UniFi Controller Administrator credentials, I set out to create a solution that could -- eventually -- simply be run as a Docker container.
In order for the script to be successful, you must either have or create a user with Administrator rights as only admins can download the Backup files. Furthermore, you have either manual backups or automatic backups configured.
There are two ways to run this project:
- download locally, build with
yarn, set the environment and just run it, or - use the Docker container from the GitHub Docker registry.
First, checkout the code, and define your credentials in an .env file in the directory where you checked out the code:
# .env file
UNIFI_USERNAME=<username>
UNIFI_PASSWORD=<password>
UNIFI_URL=<your_unifi_controller>
# Set the backup location if needed (otherwise, it's the current directory)
# BACKUP_LOCATION=<path for backup files>
Then, build it as follows:
yarn install && yarn build
And, finally, run it with the following command (repeat this every one and then to keep your downloaded backups up to date).
yarn node dist/index.js
The script will either load the .env file or the environment variables from the environment.
To run it with Docker is as easy as follows (I might add support for secrets at some point, at least by mapping one secrets file to the .env file in the container). Don't forget to set the environment variables either directly or via some op wizardry and make sure the mounted /backup volume exists.
As the container will run once, and then stop, adding the --rm option might or might not be a good idea. Since I expect you know what you're doing when you attempt to use this, I leave it up to you to decide whats right for you or not.
docker run --rm \
-e UNIFI_USERNAME=<username> \
-e UNIFI_PASSWORD=<password> \
-e UNIFI_URL=<your_unifi_controller> \
-v ~/unifi-backups:/backups \
ghcr.io/johannrichard/unifi-backup/unifi-controller-backup
If successful, the script will download the latest Controller Backup file and store it in the location you mapped to /backups.
The script outputs two things:
- the date of the backup downloaded
- the (local) path of the download (in the case of the Docker container, this will always be
/backups, mounted to the local volume of your choice).
Downloading latest backup 2022-09-08T22:00:00Z
Write backup: /backups/autobackup_7.1.66_20220908_2200_1662674400059.unf
Your UniFi Controller most probably lives on a different port than the standard HTTPS one (443). It is therefore necessary to specify the full URL, including the port for UNIFI_URL:
UNIFI_URL=https://my-unifi:8443
Big thanks to @thib3113 for his wonderful unifi-client node.js library. With it, programming this was a breeze. It took me longer to create a proper build system and the Dockerfile than to write the code itself.