Help using password-file

Getting Help
1

Hello,

I’m trying to use the password-file option to read my b2 credentials, but I’m running into a little trouble.

When I run restic with --password-file /home/me/passwd.txt

it returns the message:
"Fatal: unable to open B2 backend: Account ID ($B2_ACCOUNT_ID) is empty.

If I don’t specify the repo with the -r flag, but instead try to read that from the passwd.txt file, it gives me the message:
“Fatal: Please specify repository location”

So, it appears that restic is not accessing the passwd.txt file at all.

Can someone tell me the proper way to use the password-file flag? What is the correct syntax to use for the credentials in the password file?

Thanks

2

If I read the documentation correctly the password-file is meant to contain nothing but the password. You must not place anything else in there.

If you want to save all information in a file you can source it.

Contents of credentials.txt:

export RESTIC_REPOSITORY="b2:bucketname:path/to/repo"
export B2_ACCOUNT_ID="myid"
export B2_ACCOUNT_KEY="mysecretkey"

On the command line:

user@client:~$ source credentials.txt
user@client:~$ restic backup /path/to/files
3

Also the user you run the restic command as must be able to read the password file. Make sure that the permissions are set correctly.

4

Yeah, now that I read the documentation correctly, I think you’re right. :smiley:

Thanks for setting me straight!

5

I’m glad you figured it out, thanks @moritzdietz for the help!

If you have any idea on how to improve the documentation (e.g. wording, adding a setence or so), please let us know!

6

I’m trying to set up restic with B2 right now and I’m running into the same issue. Here’s my (incomplete) suggestion for the documentation.

In this section it currently says:

You need to first setup the following environment variables with the credentials you can find in the dashboard on the “Buckets” page when signed into your B2 account:

$ export B2_ACCOUNT_ID=<MY_APPLICATION_KEY_ID>
$ export B2_ACCOUNT_KEY=<MY_APPLICATION_KEY>

Immediately underneath I would have expected something like this:

Instead of passing the B2 credentials as environment variables, restic can read them from a file. For this you need to call it with these two parameters:

restic --password-file=./my-b2-password --something-file=./my-b2-account-id

As you can see I haven’t found out how to pass the account ID yet.

Edit: Actually I haven’t found out how to pass the account key either because apparently --password-file=... does not read it from the file - even when I set it, I still get an error:

Fatal: create repository at failed: Fatal: unable to open B2 backend: Key ($B2_ACCOUNT_KEY) is empty

Edit: --password-file is for the backup encryption password. I’m an idiot.

What confused me was that there simply seems to be no way to specify B2 credentials by file. That’s a bit unexpected.