Backing up the EAC application provisioning with eaccmd

If you use eaccmd (and not the Deployment Template), to back up an existing application's provisioning, you can run the eaccmd describe-app command and redirect its output to a file. This is a useful technique for testing, since it allows you to easily revert your application to its original provisioning if you make unwanted changes.

It is possible to use the eaccmd describe-app command for this purpose, because the output of this command is in the same XML format used by the eaccmd define-app command.

For more information on the eaccmd commands see the "Provisioning commands" section in the "Using the Eaccmd Tool" chapter of the EAC Guide.

To back up provisioning for an existing application with eaccmd:

Run the following command: eaccmd describe-app --app application_name –canonical>application.xml This command writes the XML to a file that can easily be used later by the define-app command. The eaccmd describe-app –canonical command has a required –app parameter that takes the name of the application to be described. The --canonical flag forces the application's description to use absolute paths for every entry, and to resolve references such as . and .. to produce straightforward paths. This makes reading the application description significantly easier.

You can later use the resulting application description file as a definition file for the eaccmd define-app command.