Here’s another DreamHost tip, this time for using mysqldump to export a MySQL database. You could always use phpMyAdmin to export a database, but there are times when the mysqldump command is either easier, better, or in my case when I had an extremely large database, the only option.
DreamHost has a mysqldump page in their wiki that explains how to set up a mysqldump script as a cron job, but I wanted to run this as a standalone command. Here is what I came up with:
mysqldump -c -h [domain] --user [user] --password=[password] [database] > [filename]
Note: Any of the values needed for this command can probably be found on the “MySQL Databases” section under the “Goodies” menu item in the DreamHost control panel.
- [domain] is the hostname associated with the database you are wanting to export.
- [user] is a user with access to the database.
- [password] is the password for the user.
- [database] is the name of the database.
- [filename] is the name of the file you would like to save from the export, ending in
.sql. You can put a file path in here as well. If you don’t supply a path, it will just save the file in your current directory.
Here is an example usage of the command:
mysqldump -c -h mysql.mydomain.com --user myuser --password=mypassword mydatabase > mydatabase.sql