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Chapter 1. Introduction and installation

What is UNiTE?

UNiTE is an automated, unattended backup archive restoration tool. It's goal is to restore backup archives taken with Akeeba Backup or Akeeba Solo without any human intervention.

It can work with backup archives already present on the server it is running, backup archives downloaded from Amazon S3, and taking a remote backup and download the generated backup archive using the JSON API of our backup products.

UNiTE is created with the power user and automation in mind. It eschews creature comforts for raw power and flexibility. It's meant to run from the command line, a CRON job or automation software like Ansible. Please remember that UNiTE is not a CMS integrated extension, i.e. not a Joomla! component or WordPress plugin. As a result it can not be installed in Joomla!, WordPress or any other CMS. A certain degree of experience is required due to the command-line nature of the script.

[Note]Note

If you want to use a web interface to extract and restore backup archives, or a command–line software to extract a backup archive without restoring it: please use Akeeba Kickstart instead.

UNiTE is written in PHP and delivered as a PHAR executable (a file with a .phar extension). PHAR files can be executed through PHP. They are the preferred delivery format for numerous modern PHP applications such as Composer, PHPUnit, Phing and so on.

UNiTE is available for download to all of our subscribers who have download access to Akeeba Backup Professional for Joomla! or WordPress; or Akeeba Solo Professional. UNiTE is not sold separately.

Typical use cases

Typically, UNiTE is used for the following tasks:

  • Provisioning of new Joomla!, WordPress, etc websites. You only need to supply an XML, JSON or YAML file which describes how the new site will be configured and a backup archive. At the end of the UNiTE run you'll have a configured website, ready for use.

  • Demo sites. Demo sites need to be restored from a known good backup on predefined intervals. Akeeba UNiTE can easily be used for this task.

  • Dev-to-staging, staging-to-live and generally server–to–server site transfer automation. Some setups require that before anything goes on the live site it should first go through a dev server (where all active development takes place) and a staging server (where user experience tests are conducted) before hitting the live site. UNiTE can be used to automatically backup the dev site and restore to the staging site, or even backup the staging site and restore it to the live site.