AppleScript, mother tongue of Mac’rs

Before you were a Codewarrior addict, later Carbon libraries consumer, then Cocoa, then Obj-c, then iPhone developer, then what!

If you are a Mac user (not developer, being old or new to the business), AppleScript is your friend. In fact, any OSA-based language or “dialect” if I can call it so (such as appscript by Has or some handmade experiments by Phillip Aker). Apple Events. Application Intercommunication. Sounds like simple, but it’s the marmalade (not to talk about glue) of the daily workflow of hundreds of thousands of Mac users.

Come to mind other “experiments”, like “basic” (being Real or MS) or JavaScript for apps (such as Adobe’s apps or Air), but that is just System/App communication. It’s fine, but not in any way a checkpoint.

Although Qilania lives in a Ubuntu-driven server, many automation tasks are done in various “slave” machines, and many of them are driven by AppleScript, specially mirroring and db integration. For example, you can make tiny changes to a SWF file, and see them live in a few seconds. First, on the local server. Then, in the live server. And also changes are propagated to backup disks and so on. Magic under a double-click. Lots of technology involved: network connections, remote servers via ssh or sftp or scp, various desktop applications, etc. And one scripting language to rule them all: AppleScript.

I can ensure today, Sep 10th 2010, there is not programming language to acomplish most of these tasks we solve in a few seconds in Qilania, not in Mac nor in Win or *nix.

AppleScript, the marmalade and mother tongue of all Mac users.

Advertisement

Backup remote mysql databases to local MAMP via AppleScript/SSH

Requirements: access to the remote machine (usually a server) via SSH.

I backup my databases to the local installation of MAMP (stands for Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP), but you can specify any directory you wish.

First step: do some stuff, so you can login automatically (no password prompt) to the remote machine. I followed the steps at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=30709 and it worked flawlessly. In the first step exposed there, just type what the folk says, then “enter” all the time long (no need to enter data).

After you successfully copy the public key to the remote server, just copy-paste the following to your script editor, modify what you need to match your settings and hit “Run”:

--> this is the folder where the remote "mysql" dir will be copied
--> I choose MAMP's one, but you can choose any for backup purposes
set localDir to "User:Library:Application Support:appsolute:MAMP PRO:db:"

--> enter your server, the dir where your "mysql" dir is located (usually something as /var/lib)
--> and move it to whatever location is available via HTTP
--> if you don't have such service, you can use "scp" to copy the file to your machine
--> but then you must setup your machine to accept SSH connections
with timeout of 3600 seconds --> 1 hour
do shell script "ssh -l root server.com 'cd /var/lib; tar -zcf mysql.tar.gz mysql;mv mysql.tar.gz /var/www'"
end timeout

--> download tgz file and remove pre-existing "mysql" folder in local machine (not sure yours, mine yes)
do shell script "cd " & quoted form of POSIX path of localDir & "; curl -O http://www.server.com/mysql.tar.gz; rm -rf mysql;"

--> unpack
tell application "Finder" to open (localDir & "mysql.tar.gz")

--> remove tgz file from remote and local servers (I'll keep the uncompressed dir)
do shell script "ssh -l root qilania.com 'rm /var/www/mysql.tar.gz'; rm " & quoted form of POSIX path of (localDir & "mysql.tar.gz")

Cheers!

EDIT: See this post for a different option (supports other db engines, such as InnoDB).