Rustic Server? It that what I need?

[f18m]

Hey all,

First of all, let me say that Rustic is great and, despite warnings on the website, I'm using for my "production": i.e. for backupping all my personal data I care about. In particular I do the backup of my NAS to DeepGlacier, as additional redundancy layer.
For the last 2 years or so, I've been automatic Rustic snapshotting via some (ugly) Bash scripts that involve a "screen" session on a Linux server I own and several other "hacks".
I'd love to get away from these and implement a better, more solid solution.

Thinking about it, I would like to have a server/daemon process running on my Linux that allows me to:

• trigger a backup referencing a TOML file or sending in an equivalent format all information contained in Rustic TOML config file
• check the status of the server: is it idle/backupping/restoring?
• check the progress of the server task: backups can take quite a bit of time... what's the current percentage?
• eventually stop a running server task
• check credentials: e.g. is auth to AWS DeepGlacier working fine?

So my question for you is: is the rustic server what I'm looking for?
If not, do you know of anything like that?
If not, do you think it would be a MAJOR effort to develop a software meeting all requirements I listed above?

Thank you so much and keep up the amazing job!!

Francesco

[aawsome]

Hi @f18m

rustic_server is a simple REST server providing a storage backend interface to use with rustic. So this is not what you are looking for.

I started https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic_scheduler a while ago which currently is more a proof-of-concept of what you want. It needs to be updated to latest rustic_core, but otherwise should be already usable.

[sunmy2019]

by exposing a truly open API interface from Rustic

What do you mean by "truly open" ?

[sunmy2019]

Full API interface are exposed by rustic_core library.

[aawsome]

@f18m You are talking about a network API, right?
I think we should add this to rustic itself by adding a rustic serve command which allows to connect to an OpenAPI interface.

I already started by moving the webdav command to axum, see #1720. This will allow using axum and utopia to define the OpenAPI interface without having too much dependency bloat..

interface supporting commands like "start new backup job", "get backup stats by job ID", "stop job", etc?

Starting a new backup job is pretty easy, but backup stats (at least during a backup run) or stoping would need more support from the rustic/rustic_core integration. I suggest to start with starting a backup. @f18m can you please sketch how you think the API should look like?

[f18m]

hey @aawsome , @sunmy2019 ,

You are talking about a network API, right?

yes correct!

I think we should add this to rustic itself by adding a rustic serve command which allows to connect to an OpenAPI interface.

Yep this would be even better and more aligned to what other software provide, good point!!

I already started by moving the webdav command to axum, see #1720. This will allow using axum and utopia to define the OpenAPI interface without having too much dependency bloat..

Exciting! I'm not really much into Rust but I'm confident Claude/Copilot can help me on the way :)
You mean "utoipa" (https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa) as something to be added on top of "axum" right?

Starting a new backup job is pretty easy, but backup stats (at least during a backup run) or stoping would need more support from the rustic/rustic_core integration. I suggest to start with starting a backup. @f18m can you please sketch how you think the API should look like?

Yes I agree, let's go step by step. Even if backup stats are a pretty basic target (but I'm thinking just to the equivalent of the progress bar you get on the terminal using rustic backup).
I can surely sketch the API.
I went quickly over the "utoipa" description and I believe that the way it works is that I write Rust code (looking at their example) and then the crate will automatically produce OpenAPI / Swagger docs, right?

So the API sketch should happen in Rust language to my understanding... I can give it a try!

[aawsome]

Exciting! I'm not really much into Rust but I'm confident Claude/Copilot can help me on the way :)
You mean "utoipa" (https://github.com/juhaku/utoipa) as something to be added on top of "axum" right?

Yes, IMO using utoipa is the "Rust"-Way to add an OpenUI/Swagger interface. But you can also try to just specify an OpenUI interface and I'll take care of how to put this into Rust code. Or you make a PR or post some code snippets - as you want!