bivac: Error in Log: invalid character ' ' in string escape code

Hi I’m using bivac to backup a bunch of docker volumes. Bivac runs as docker container itself, using the following docker-compose.yml (latest was version 2.1.0):

version: '2' 
services:
  bivac:
    image: camptocamp/bivac:latest
    command: manager
    container_name: bivac
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "8182:8182"
    volumes:
      - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro"
      - "/var/backups:/var/backups"
    environment:
      BIVAC_SERVER_PSK: my-psk
      RESTIC_PASSWORD: my-password
      BIVAC_TARGET_URL: /var/backups
      BIVAC_AGENT_IMAGE: camptocamp/bivac:latest

The backup process seems to work properly - the restic repo is created under /var/backups/my.server.net of the docker host.

But if I use docker-compose logs, I see the following errors: https://pastebin.com/XxCfHPWY

First a warning

[36mbivac    |[0m time="2019-08-26T05:56:23Z" level=warning msg="failed to unmarshal agent output: invalid character ' ' in string escape code -> ` ... big output as in the above pastebin ... `

followed by an error

[36mbivac    |[0m time="2019-08-26T05:56:23Z" level=error msg="failed to backup volume: invalid character ' ' in string escape code" ` ... big output as in the above pastebin ... `

Do you see any issues?

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 5 years ago
Comments: 45 (19 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Ok, great! I’m working on a cleaner fix and will release a new minor version asap.

Thank you very much @neuhausf and @dhilgarth for you help!

cryptobioz on Oct 18, 2019

@cryptobioz Yes, but I used an online Base64 Decoder: https://www.base64decode.org/

If you paste my output (and remove the trailing `") then you end with a json which contains base64 decoded output itself. I managed to properly decode all 3 stdout objects.

neuhausf on Oct 17, 2019

I just saw the same issue in the logs. As far as I can tell, there is a space character in the middle of the JSON string at an unexpected location. In my case, it was between a backslash and the corresponding double quote that it escaped.
I found it by copying the text from the bivac log and assigning it to a variable. I used Javascript. Then, I tried to use JSON.parse on that variable and got an error message pointing to a specific location in that string.

The original string in the log looks like this:

1f\\\"},{\\\"time\\ \":\\\"2019-08-29T11:17:23.76133

You can see the space after the double backslash after time.
Assigning it to a variable results in this:

1f\"},{\"time\ ":\"2019-08-29T11:17:23.76133

(Maybe this area of the code is related to it: Lines 185 to 188 of https://github.com/camptocamp/bivac/blob/951ea2734fbc0f410ee55edbb9a32bc5eb5e63ca/pkg/orchestrators/docker.go - at least that’s where the string is coming from that it then fails to parse)

dhilgarth on Sep 22, 2019