General commands

Barman has many commands and, for the sake of exposition, we can organize them by scope.

The scope of the generalcommands is the entire Barman server, that can backup many PostgreSQL servers. Servercommands , instead, act only on a specified server. Backupcommands work on a backup, which is taken from a certain server.

The following list includes the general commands.

cron

barman doesn’t include a long-running daemon or service file (there’s nothing to systemctl start , service start , etc.). Instead, the barman cron subcommand is provided to perform barman ’s background “steady-state” backup operations.

You can perform maintenance operations, on both WAL files and backups, using the cron command:

barman cron

Note

This command should be executed in a cron script. Our recommendation is to schedule barman cron to run every minute. If you installed Barman using the rpm or debian package, a cron entry running on every minute will be created for you.

barman cron executes WAL archiving operations concurrently on a server basis, and this also enforces retention policies on those servers that have:

• retention_policy not empty and valid;

• retention_policy_mode set to auto .

The cron command ensures that WAL streaming is started for those servers that have requested it, by transparently executing the receive-wal command.

In order to stop the operations started by the cron command, comment out the cron entry and execute:

barman receive-wal --stop SERVER_NAME

You might want to check barman list-servers to make sure you get all of your servers.

diagnose

The diagnose command creates a JSON report useful for diagnostic and support purposes. This report contains information for all configured servers.

Important

Even if the diagnose is written in JSON and that format is thought to be machine readable, its structure is not to be considered part of the interface. Format can change between different Barman versions.

list-servers

You can display the list of active servers that have been configured for your backup system with:

barman list-servers

A machine readable output can be obtained with the --minimal option:

barman list-servers --minimal