Passing --exclude-file to restic

[garrettreid]

I'm not sure this isn't user error, so posting a discussion here rather than a bug.

I'm new to backrest, and trying out system backups. I'm running on macOS with brew services, and have configured a repository "drive"; I use Backrest's configuration test and it's working. Looking on the server, the restic repository was initialized successfully.

When using restic directly, my invocation is pretty simple due to ssh config defining the host restic. My goal is to be able to clone the config to multiple systems, changing only the ssh config to different users. (Note to detailed reader: multiple users are not sharing the same directory, the server has per-user chroots). My restic backup invocation:
restic --password-file ~/.restic_file -r sftp://restic:/backup backup --files-from $HOME/.config/restic_include --exclude-file $HOME/.config/restic_exclude $HOME.

How do I pass --exclude-file to Backrest? When I put in a backup flag of --exclude-file $HOME/.config/restic_exclude, I get an error that implies the remote host is missing from the restic invocation:

error: failed to backup: command "/Users/user/.local/share/backrest/restic backup --json /Applications /Users/user -o sftp.args=-oBatc..." failed: exit code 1: backup failed
processing command output: no summary event found

Drilling into logs, I see this:

[restic] command: "/Users/user/.local/share/backrest/restic backup --json /Applications /Users/user -o sftp.args=-oBatchMode=yes --exclude-caches --tag plan:drive-full --tag created-by:laptop-backrest --exclude $HOME/Desktop --exclude $HOME/Documents --exclude-file $HOME/.config/restic_exclude"
[tasklog] 11:34:23.233Z	error	backup for plan "drive-full"	task failed	{"error": "failed to backup: command \"/Users/user/.local/share/backrest/restic backup --json /Applications /Users/user -o sftp.args=-oBatc...\" failed: exit code 1: backup failed\nprocessing command output: no summary event found", "duration": 2.013624333}

For debugging purposes, I tried running the restic command directly, after pre-setting the environment variables I assume Backrest is using. It works.

❯ export RESTIC_REPOSITORY
❯ export RESTIC_PASSWORD
❯ /Users/user/.local/share/backrest/restic backup --json /Applications /Users/user -o sftp.args=-oBatchMode=yes --exclude-caches --tag plan:drive-full --tag created-by:laptop-backrest --exclude $HOME/Desktop --exclude $HOME/Documents --exclude-file $HOME/.config/restic_exclude
{"message_type":"status","percent_done":0.08467316136831866,"total_files":159,"files_done":10,"total_bytes":61101498,"bytes_done":5173657,"current_files":["/Applications/1Blocker.app/Contents/MacOS/1Blocker","/Applications/1Blocker.app/Contents/PlugIns/1Blocker Actions.appex/Contents/MacOS/1Blocker Actions"]}
...

How do I correctly invoke with --exclude-file? My --exclude-file is both rather long and contains a number of $HOME references, which I'm not certain will work correctly given I couldn't add $HOME as a backup path either. I would rather not need to manually transcode this for every host I set up.

[justauserid]

In backup flags set it

--exclude-file=/Users/user/file path

Should work. My mac is being re-setup right now so I don't have a backrest installation right now so I can't share screenshots, but this is what I found from my last config.json inside backup_flags json array.

[garrettreid]

That solved it, thank you!