UNiTE, Remote CLI, eXtract Wizard

Sunday, 06 November 2011 20:09 CST

marchy

Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the forum before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: (1.5.14)
PHP version: (5.2.13 )
MySQL version: (MySQL client version: 5.0.91)
Host: (optional, but it helps us help you)
Akeeba eXtract Wizard Akeeba Backup 3.3.5 / Remote Control 4.0.8 / SiteDiff version: (unknown)

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach the Remote Control and Akeeba Backup log files if you are reporting an Akeeba Remote Control issue, othrewise we can not help you

Description of my issue:

I have 5 websites that I am using remote akeeba. 3 of them works perfect. They do the back up and download the files and also send the email. 2 of them backup the files but do not download. I have sent you the data of one of them.

Let me know what you think?

Also the remote one ask me to download a new version 4.0.9 and get this message "could not wuery info: invalid HTTP status code (403). Does it have something to do with my ESET security?

Thx

Marcel

Monday, 07 November 2011 02:02 CST

nicholas

Hello Marcel,

Please note that Akeeba Remote Control has been discontinued as of May 27th, 2011. The main reason for discontinuing it was that the download of large files was erratic and didn't work most of the times. Maybe 4.0.9 will work for you.

Regarding the update issues, yes, the problem is ESET. Temporarily disable it, run the update and enable it again. I am aware of that conflict, which was another nail in the coffin of Remote Control.

You can also try using our new, supported Remote CLI script. It's written entirely in PHP and is able to reliably download backup archives. The only drawback is that it is command-line only (it doesn't have a graphical interface).

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 07 November 2011 11:25 CST

marchy

Thx Nicholas, I will see what option I will take. I am not a programmer so the CLI script will take a while for me to understand and set up. Maybe I will go to an FTP cron job to download the files.

I am still getting the error message when I try to update to the new version even if I disable ESET.

Monday, 07 November 2011 11:38 CST

nicholas

The CLI may look daunting at first, but think of it as Lego blocks put together:
- First, it's the path to the PHP executable (php.exe). That's easy to figure out. Let's say it's c:\PHP\PHP.exe.
- Then, it's "remote.phar"
- Next up --host and your domain name, e.g. www.example.com
- Immediately followed by --secret and your secret key, e.g. akeebarocks
- Now add -a backup to tell it to backup the site
- Tuck --download to tell it that you want the result to be downloaded
- and --dlmode http to tell it to use HTTP to download the files, like Remote Control did
- finally, --dlpath "c:\" to tell it download everything to c:\

Let's put the Lego blocks together now:
c:\PHP\PHP.exe remote.phar --host www.example.com --secret akeebarocks -a backup --download --dlmode http --dlpath "c:\"

Ta-da! All you have to know is that you should only run this command from the same directory you have placed remote.phar in. And there you have it! You don't have to be a developer to understand it. It's just getting past your fear and start thinking about it as small Lego bricks put together to create something complex. Once you realise it's just Lego bricks, it becomes SO much easier ;)

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 07 November 2011 13:20 CST

marchy

Thx Nicholas, I will definitely try it.

Can you tell me when I try to install the PHP 5.3.8 they ask me for IIS FastCGI or Other CGI or Do not set up a web sever.

Which one should I use?

Monday, 07 November 2011 14:23 CST

nicholas

Hi!

I am assuming that you have just downloaded PHP's Windows installer and trying to install it on your PC, right? In this case, you need to select "Do not set up a web server" as you most likely don't have a server or would certainly not like PHP's installer messing up with a XAMPP, WAMPServer, etc installation on your PC.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 07 November 2011 19:03 CST

marchy

Thx, I am trying to open the remote.phar file but it opens 1 second and disappear.

Any idea?

Tuesday, 08 November 2011 02:03 CST

nicholas

I think you tried to double click the file from Windows Explorer, that's why it opens and closes immediately. Instead, open the Command Prompt. Let's say that you have placed remote.phar in the root of your hard disk, c:\. Enter this command:

cd c:\

Now do

dir

It should list remote.phar as one of the files there. Now, let's test Remote CLI. You need to know the path to PHP which I assume is c:\PHP\PHP.exe. Do this on the prompt:

c:\php\php.exe remote.phar

Remote CLI should complain that there is no action specified. Now you can give it the full command to backup your site.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 10 November 2011 08:23 CST

user36213

I can appreciate your problems with the remote cli. I thought the previous remote desktop application was amazing and it saved me hours of manual work when it came to backing up every site each month, and i never had any problems with it working.
Now having to use this method i'm more confused than ever. I downloaded the remote.phar file but where am i supposed to put it for starters?

and where on a Mac can i run this command line? i have mamp on the Mac and Wamp on the pc and the location of the php.exe file on the pc is then: C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.8\php.exe so i have tried that and also adding the path to the remote.phar file but the screen just flashes up then disappears again.

Any advice appreciated, or a way to run the remote app with newer versions of akeeba backup, thanks.

Thursday, 10 November 2011 14:28 CST

nicholas

Hi!

Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Lion ship with PHP pre-installed. Just open Terminal and run

which php

It should now reply with /usr/bin/php which means that the php command can be found and its full path is /user/bin/php.

That said, both Remote CLI and Remote Control use the same JSON API to backup the site. The difference between them is the method used to download the backup archive from the server to your Mac. Remote Control had memory leak issues which could not be fixed and would crash after downloading a few dozen megabytes. Remote CLI uses the much more stable (actually, rock solid!) cURL library, so it doesn't suffer from these download issues. If you want to use Remote Control you still can, but it's an unsupported method.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Friday, 11 November 2011 03:18 CST

user36213

Ah, thanks for that, i'm actually making a bit of progress now. I added in the route to the remote.phar then i get the error message:

Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required 'phar://remote.phar/arccli_version.php' (include_path='phar:///Users/willp/Desktop/remote.phar:.:') in phar:///Users/willp/Desktop/remote.phar/remote.php on line 17

Friday, 11 November 2011 09:20 CST

nicholas

I think I know what this is. You have to be in the same directory when running Remote CLI. In your case, open a terminal and enter:

cd /Users/willp/Desktop

then run Remote CLI. It should now work.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 14 November 2011 03:48 CST

user36213

sorry for hijacking this thread. I found remote control for Mac ( version 4.0.8 ) and gave it a try on a few sites and it seemed to backup fine but a couple of them wouldn't download for some reason and there doesn't seem to be a way to view the backup files on the server through the app.

So it's back to the cli method. I did as you mentioned previously and this did indeed work, and i was able to complete a backup but when it came to downloading the file from the server it didn't do anything.--- Actually scratch that, i left the terminal window open and it must have been downloading in the background as i just got a completion message!. Is there anyway to get the download progress info?, as it just looked like it stalled, thanks...

Monday, 14 November 2011 04:12 CST

nicholas

The download progress could be added, but it won't be consistent across download methods. When using the cURL method (recommended) we can have a proper progress indicator, updating itself once per second or so. I am not sure if we can show a percentage, but at least we can show how many bytes have been downloaded. With the HTTP method, most likely we can have the same thing. For the chunked HTTP download method we can only have a notification every time one more Mb is downloaded.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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