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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T04:34:07+00:00

I want to invoke mysqldump from a Spring based webapp and write the output

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I want to invoke mysqldump from a Spring based webapp and write the output to a file. I want to be able to provide a download link to the user to the file created on the server.

I tried running the following:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/usr/bin/mysqldump -u <username> -p<password> <db_name> >" + fileName);
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("mysqldump -u <username> -p<password> db_name >" + fileName);

I tried the following values of fileName.

fileName = "mysql.sql";
fileName = "/tmp/mysql.sql";
fileName = servletContext.getRealPath("") + "/mysql.sql";

But the command is not successful. process.exitValue() returns an error code of 2 or 6.

  ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("/usr/bin/mysqldump", " -u ", "<username>", " -p<password>", "<db_name>", " > ", fileName);
  pb.redirectErrorStream(true); // equivalent of 2>&1
  Process p = pb.start();
  p.waitFor();

This does not help as well.

Can someone tell me what is the best way to run such a command from the webapp? Where should the output file be created?
What is wrong with the commands above?

I need to be able to run this on different systems (Linux, Windows). The webapp runs on either system. I can abstract out the mysqldump path in a properties file if the need arises. But how do I make this work?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is probably not a very good idea. The servlet probably needs a very permissive security environment for this to work at all. If you do a search you will find lots of people having problems with this.

    Even if it works the runtime exec might block for some reason and the servlet would timeout, I don’t know the ramifications of that, but they don’t sound good to me.

    We had a similar problem where I worked a couple of years ago and wrote a simple multithreaded server that would queue up requests, and run them when it got a chance and handled things like hangs, crashes and restarts. It ran as a jsvc daemon. The servlet sent it a message over a socket.

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