Extending Blanket

Adding a new source or sink is easy. See SourcesAndSinks for more information about which ones are available.

Sources

The goal of a source is to take whatever data is desired to be backed up, archive that data into a single file, then transfer that file to the client machine.

Lifecycle

The lifecycle for sources is defined in the Capistrano recipe for blanket. If you need more lifecycle elements than these, we’ll mention how that might be done later in the document.

Configuration

The source configuration that a blanket provides in source.yml is read in during this step. To prepare your own source to write out a correct source.yml, look for the attribute_symbols methods in other sources. Be sure to include :source_type, that’s the only one that I think is absolutely mandatory, although certainly :host, :user, and :password would be extremely common.

Preparation

This is any command that needs to be issued on the remote machine to generate the one file that is to be downloaded.

Download

Cleanup

Sinks