Anonymize Mysqldump Tool

Allows you to pipe data from mysqldump and anonymize it:

mysqldump -u yada -pbadpass -h db | anonymize-mysqldump --config config.json > anonymized.sql

You may also pipe in the content of an existing SQL dump using cat:

cat database.sql | anonymize-mysqldump --config config.json > anonymized.sql

You can also define the locale for the fake data generation (defaults to en):

cat database.sql | anonymize-mysqldump --config config.json --locale nb_no > anonymized.sql

Here is the help command output as a guide.

Usage:
  anonymize-mysqldump [flags]

Flags:
  --help -h      Outputs help text and exits.
  --config       The path to a custom config file.
  --locale       The faker locale.

Config:
  The anonymizer will use a default config suitable for WordPress, but you can override this by providing your own.

Installation

Built binaries

You can download the binary for your system from the Releases page. Once downloaded and unarchived, move it to a location in your path such as /usr/local/bin and make it executable. For instance, to download the MacOS binary for 64 bit platforms (this is most common):

curl -OL https://github.com/DekodeInteraktiv/anonymize-mysqldump/releases/download/latest/anonymize-mysqldump_darwin_amd64.gz
gunzip anonymize-mysqldump_darwin_amd64.gz
mv anonymize-mysqldump_darwin_amd64 /usr/local/bin/anonymize-mysqldump
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/anonymize-mysqldump

Direct from source

You can clone this Git repository and build the project locally your self, you will then need a local Golang environment.

git clone https://github.com/DekodeInteraktiv/anonymize-mysqldump anonymize-mysqldump
cd anonymize-mysqldump
go install ./...

The above will install a copy to your PATH. You can also just build the executable and move it where you prefer using go build ./..., do take note of the three dots after the forward slash, which will make sure the build includes subdirectories.

Running tests

Golang comes with a test suite built in, you can run the tests on every file in a project using go test ./...

Usage

This tool is designed to read a file stream over STDIN and produce an output over STDOUT. A config file is required and can be provided via the -c or --config flag. An example config for anonymizing a WordPress database is provided at config.example.json:

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DekodeInteraktiv/anonymize-mysqldump/main/config.example.json

Whenever the tool experiences an error, it will output a log to STDERR. If you wish to not see that output while the command is running, redirect it to some other file (or /dev/null if you don't care):

mysqldump -u yada -pbadpass -h db | anonymize-mysqldump --config config.json 2> path/to/errors.log > anonymized.sql

Caveats

Important things to be aware of!

• Currently this only modifies INSERT statements. Should you wish to modify other fields, feel free to submit a PR.
• Verify the output file has been modified. This is a friendly reminder this tool is still in its early days and you should verify the output sql file before distributing it to ensure the desired modifications have been applied.

Config File

An example config for anonymizing a WordPress database is provided at config.example.json.

{
  "patterns": [
    {
      "tableName": "wp_users",
      "purge": false,
      "fields": []
    }
  ]
}

The config is composed of many objects in the patterns array:

• patterns: an array of objects defining what modifications should be made.
  • tableName: the name of the table the data will be stored in (used to parse INSERT statements to determine if the query should be modified.). You can also use regex to identify the relevant tables, required for multisite compatibility e.g. .*_comments.
  • purge: Optional boolean field, if set to true then any INSERT query matching the table name will be stripped out, avoiding accidentally including data that can't be anonymized in your final result.
  • fields: an array of objects defining modifications to individual values' fields
  • field: a string representing the name of the field. Not currently used, but still required to work and useful for debugging.
  • position: the 1-based index of what number column this field represents. For instance, assuming a table with 3 columns foo, bar, and baz, and you wished to modify the bar column, this value would be 2.
  • type: a string representing the type of data stored in this field. Read more about field types here.
  • constraints: an array of objects defining comparison rules used to determine if a value should be modified or not. Currently these are limited to a simple string equality comparison.
    • field: a string representing the name of the field.
    • position: the 1-based index of what number column this field represents. For instance, assuming a table with 3 columns foo, bar, and baz, and you wished to modify the bar column, this value would be 2.
    • value: string value to match against.

Constraints

Supposing you have a WordPress database and you need to modify certain meta, be it user meta, post meta, or comment meta. You can use constraints to update data only whenever a certain condition is matched. For instance, let's say you have a user meta key last_ip_address. If you wanted to change that value, you can use the following config in the fields array:

{
  "field": "meta_value",
  "position": 4,
  "type": "ipv4",
  "constraints": [
    {
      "field": "meta_key",
      "position": 3,
      "value": "last_ip_address"
    }
  ]
}

Field Types

Each column stores a certain type of data, be it a name, username, email, etc. The type property in the config is used to define the type of data stored, and ultimately the type of random data to be inserted into the field. https://github.com/dmgk/faker is used for generating the fake data. These are the types currently supported:

If you need another type, please feel free to add support and file a PR!

Releases

The releases are built by GoReleaser which automatically generates binaries for various operating systems and creates a Github release with them.

Credit

Many thanks to Automattic/go-search-replace for serving as the starting point for this tool, and HumanMade/go-anonymize-mysqldump for their improvements. Also many thanks to xwb1989/sqlparser for the SQL parsing library. We wouldn't have been able to do this without them!