Backup & Restore

All of Tragwerk's state lives in named Docker volumes plus your .env. Nothing of value is stored in the containers themselves, so a backup is a copy of those volumes and that file.

What holds state

Volume	Contents	Back up
db-data	PostgreSQL: users, teams, projects, servers, credentials, deploy history.	Yes
data-repositories	The bare git repositories your projects push to.	Yes
data-ssh	The SSH host keys and authorized_keys of the git push target.	Yes
traefik-acme	Issued TLS certificates.	Optional — they are re-requested automatically.
data-logging	Application logs.	Optional
data-project	Generated Docker and Compose files per deploy.	No — regenerated on the next deploy.
data-cache	Config cache.	No — rebuilt on start.

The .env is part of the backup

CREDENTIAL_ENCRYPTION_KEY and TWO_FACTOR_KEY live only in .env, and the database stores SSH private keys and 2FA secrets encrypted with them. A database dump restored without the matching keys leaves you with credentials nobody can decrypt — including you. Store the .env with the same care as the dump itself, and ideally somewhere separate from it.

Backing up

Dump the database:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yaml exec -T db \
  pg_dump -U app app > tragwerk-$(date +%F).sql

Archive the repositories and SSH state. These are volumes, not host paths, so read them through a throwaway container:

docker run --rm \
  -v tragwerk-prod_data-repositories:/data:ro \
  -v "$PWD":/backup \
  alpine tar czf /backup/repositories-$(date +%F).tar.gz -C /data .

docker run --rm \
  -v tragwerk-prod_data-ssh:/data:ro \
  -v "$PWD":/backup \
  alpine tar czf /backup/ssh-$(date +%F).tar.gz -C /data .

The tragwerk-prod_ prefix comes from the Compose project name. Confirm the actual names with docker volume ls.

Finally, copy the .env.

Restoring

On a fresh machine, clone the repository, restore the .env, then bring up only the database so nothing writes to it while you load the dump:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yaml up -d db
cat tragwerk-2026-07-12.sql | docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yaml exec -T db \
  psql -U app app

Unpack the volume archives the same way you created them, with tar xzf and the mount not read-only. Then start the rest of the stack:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yaml up -d

The migrate service brings the restored schema up to the current version if the dump came from an older release.

Stopping without losing data

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yaml down

This stops and removes the containers. The volumes — and therefore all your data — survive, and up -d brings everything back.

down -v deletes everything

Adding -v removes the named volumes: the database, your git repositories, and the SSH keys. There is no undo. Only use it when you intend to destroy the instance.

Related

• Install with Docker Compose
• Upgrades