Select specific timeline during restore / clone possible?

[thedatabaseme]

Hello,

I have the question if there is any possibility to select a specific timeline one wants to restore to in the clone section of the postgres CRD. I haven't found anything regarding timelines in the documentation (also not in the Spilo repo). I assume, that because a restore should be done as a clone, you see no need for implementing this. But I'm not sure.
Nevertheless, although it is not documented, it's possible to restore a cluster / database as a replacement of an existing cluster by deleting it before, then doing a clone with all the same settings in the CRD and specifying a point in time to recover to. A new timeline will be created after the restore is finished. In some complex restore scenarios it might then be needed to specify a timeline to restore as a target.

In the postgresql.conf the recovery settings always look like this:

recovery_target_action = 'promote'
recovery_target_time = '2022-03-11T10:46:00+00:00'
recovery_target_timeline = 'latest'
restore_command = 'envdir "/run/etc/wal-e.d/env-clone-haberkernp-backup-test" /scripts/restore_command.sh "%f" "%p"'

• Which image of the operator are you using?
  registry.opensource.zalan.do/acid/postgres-operator:v1.7.1
• Where do you run it - cloud or metal? Kubernetes or OpenShift? [AWS K8s | GCP ... | Bare Metal K8s]
  Selfthosted K8s
• Are you running Postgres Operator in production? [yes | no]
  yes
• Type of issue? [Bug report, question, feature request, etc.]
  question, maybe feature request

[FxKu]

Restoring in place after deleting the cluster is possible. I'm surprised it's not in our docs. Check my PR #1833 how it must be done.

[thedatabaseme]

Ok, that's the way I'm doing it. So how would you specify restoring inplace to a specific timeline? As far as I can see, setting the recovery_target_timeline to latest is hard coded (in Spilo though).

[FxKu]

I'm only aware that you can specify the timestamp. Maybe ask in the Spilo repo, too. Don't know if this can supported easily?

[thedatabaseme]

I did so. It's opened here.

[siegenthalerroger]

CLONE_TARGET_TIMELINE was added as a variable in Spilo. Would this be usable just by adding it to the ConfigMap that also includes the CLONE_WALG_... variables or is additional support from the operator required?