Configuration¶
SCM Backup is configured in YAML, by editing the config file settings.yml
.
Note
SCM Backup automatically makes a backup of its own configuration.
On each run, the following files are copied to the backup folder, into a subfolder named _config
:
settings.yml
- The logger’s config file
General Options¶
localFolder¶
The folder (on the machine where SCM Backup runs) where all the backups will be stored.
The folder must already exist, SCM Backup won’t create it.
Example:
localFolder: 'c:\scm-backup'
waitSecondsOnError¶
When an error occurs, SCM Backup will wait that many seconds before exiting the application.
Example:
waitSecondsOnError: 5
scms¶
SCM Backup uses the source control software already installed on your system. By default, it assumes that the required SCMs are installed in your path.
If this isn’t the case, or if you have multiple versions of the same SCM on your system and want SCM Backup to use a specific one, you can specify the complete path to the executable in the config file.
Example:
scms:
- name: git
path: 'c:\git\git.exe'
email¶
Settings for sending log information via email.
By default, the whole section is commented out via #
. To enable it, remove the comments so it looks like this:
email:
from: from@example.com
to: to@example.com
server: smtp.example.com
port: 0
useSsl: false
userName: testuser
password: not-the-real-password
Fill all settings with the proper values for your server.
SCM Backup will try sending emails when an un-commented email
section exists in the configuration.
Sources¶
SCM Backup is able to backup from multiple source code hosters, and multiple accounts per hoster.
For example, your GitHub user may be a member of an organization, and you may want to backup all repositories of your user, and all repositories of that organization.
In SCM Backup terms, these would be two different sources: your GitHub user would be one source, and the organization would be a second one.
You can define as many sources as you want in the config file, in this format:
sources:
- title: some_title
hoster: github
type: user
name: your_user_name
- title: another_title
hoster: github
type: org
name: your_org_name
Each source must have at least those four properties:
title
Must be unique in the whole config file.
For each source, SCM Backup will create a sub-folder named like the source’s title in the main backup folder.
hoster
The source code hoster from which you want to backup. See the sub-pages for valid values for each hoster.
type
Eitheruser
ororg
, depending if you want to backup an user or a organization.
name
The name of the user/organization you want to backup.
Authentication¶
Without authentication, SCM Backup can only backup your public repositories.
In this case, it shows a warning:

To backup your private repositories as well, you need to authenticate by setting two more properties for the source:
authName
Name of the user which is used for authentication.
password
The password/token/whatever (this varies wildly depending on the source code hoster)
If you don’t want to save your passwords directly in a config file, SCM Backup is able to get them from environment variables.
Example:
password: '%some_variable%'
If an environment variable named some_variable
exists, the string %some_variable%
will be replaced by the value of that variable.
This works for parts of the password as well:
password: 'foo%some_variable%bar'
Note
If you use environment variables, you must quote the string as shown in the examples above.
password: %some_variable%
will not work because in YAML, strings containing %
must always be quoted.
See the respective sub-page for detailed documentation per hoster:
ignoreRepos¶
Optional: For each source, you can specify a list of repositories you do not want to be backed up.
Example:
sources:
- title: some_title
hoster: github
type: user
name: your_user_name
ignoreRepos:
- repo1
- Some-Other-Repo
Note
- The repository names are case-sensitive!
- For hosters where the repositories are “sub-items” of the users (like GitHub), you just need to specify the repository name, not the user name (i.e.
repo
instead ofuser/repo
).