First, let me say... that I'm using MAMP on a Mac... so the location of mysqldump is most
likely different than what you're using... but when I reduced your code down to just
executable lines... and only those necessary to DO the backup I came up with the
following below (with a few enhancements).
On the mysqldump command I should note... that you had THREE '-', rather than two.
e.g. you had: ---user where you should have had --user You also were NOT sending
the file anywhere. You need to add '> '.$backupFile;
Also, use the 'echo $command' line... to output your command... and then cut-n-paste it
to the command line to insure that it functions properly.
<?php
$dbname = 'dbname' ;
$dbuser = 'user';
$dbpass = 'password';
$dbhost = 'localhost';;
$datetime = date ('Ymd_His');
$backupFile = '/tmp/'.$datetime.'-'.$dbname.'.sql';
$mysqldump = '/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqldump';
$command = $mysqldump." --user ".$dbuser." --password=".$dbpass." ".$dbname." >
".$backupFile;
echo "command = ".$command."\n";
exec ($command, $retval);
var_dump ($reval);
?>
