Magento 2 - Tips and Tricks

GDPR – WHAT SHOPULD WE KNOW FROM IT?

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation.

The General Data Protection Regulation is a regulation in European (EU) law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas. The GDPR primarily aims to give control to individuals over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU.

The GDPR was adopted on 14th April 2016 and became enforceable beginning 25th May 2018. As the GDPR is a regulation, not a directive, it does not require national governments to pass any enabling legislation and is directly binding and applicable.

Gdpr Compliance In Magento Front-End:

As the customer interacts with Magento’s front-end and submits his personal details, Magento front-end must also comply with GDPR. So, here are some suggestions:

  • Allowing/Disallowing Cookies: When a customer opens the website, he should be asked to allow the cookies to store/manage his personal data. This is because any information stored in cookies can easily be seen through the browser’s tool.
  • Accepting Privacy Policy While Registration: There should be a checkbox to accept Privacy Policies on the Customer Registration page. Privacy Policies should clearly explain what kind of details will be managed or used by the system and where those details will be used. For instance, the system will save the customer’s email address to notify them about the current status of his order.
    Suppose the customer does not accept with Privacy Policy consent while registering. In that case, the system must ask to accept the consent when the customer is about to check out his order because there would be billing address, shipping address, mobile number, email address, first name, and last name will be retrieved to process the order.

Providing Privacy Settings To Customers:

The customer should have some Privacy Settings under his account to manage his personal information. Basic settings can be the following:

Personal Data:

The customer must always know and be aware of the information used by the system. He should be able to see that personal data in his account. If possible, then provide an option to the customer to download the entire data used by the system.

Anonymising Personal Data:

The customer should be able to anonymize his personal details anytime after completion of all of his orders as he might never want the system to manage his personal after a specific period.

Revoking his Privacy Policy Consent:

The customer should be able to revoke his consent anytime to feel comfortable while he would using the entire front end. If he sees any issue, he can revoke his consent anytime.

Deleting Account:

The system should allow the customer to request deleting his account from the system.

Taking Magento 2 Database Backup with GDPR compliance

With Magento 2 database, a database dump is generally created that has the entire database’s structure and data. This dump usually includes tables with customers’ personal data such as names, addresses, invoices, orders, emails, numbers, etc. Generally, when exporting a customer’s data is not needed, it is considered bad practice as the data might get stolen, lost or available to unwanted people.

To overcome this issue, N98-magerun2 provides Database Dump Tool to manage the database dump in Magento 2 through the command line.

To achieve this tool, N98-magerun2 should be installed and it can be installed through either Phar file or Composer.

Installing Phar File:

Installing Phar File:

shasum -a256 n98-magerun2.phar

  • Now, to make the phar-file executable, run the following command: chmod +x n98-magerun2.phar
  • After the base installation has been completed, it can be verified as: n98-magerun2.phar -version
  • The above command should show the output like this: n98-magerun2 version 1.3.2 by netz98 GmbH
  • Now, phar can be called by using PHP CLI Interpreter: php n98-magerun2.phar {command}

Installing With Composer:

  • Require Magerun within the Magento (or any other) project and then execute it from the vendor’s bin folder: composer require n98/magerun2
  • If it shows any issue, then try the following command:composer require –no-update n98/magerun2

Installing With Composer:

  • Require Magerun within the Magento (or any other) project and then execute it from the vendor’s bin folder:
  • composer requires n98/magerun2
  • If any issue shows up, try the following command:
  • composer require –no-update n98/magerun2

composer update

  • To verify the installation, check the version by running the following command:
    ./vendor/bin/n98-magerun2 –version

Output: n98-magerun2 version 1.3.2 by netz98 GmbH

Dumping The Database:

The db:dumpcommand is used to dump the project database,. It uses mysqdump:

php n98-magerun2.phar db:dump

The above command will create a file having the structure and data of the entire database.

Stripping Database Dump:

-strip argument can be used to exclude specific tables from the dump. It can be used as:

php n98-magerun2.phar db:dump [–strip]

Tables can also be stripped directly by adding them with space. Wildcards like * and ? Can be used to strip multiple tables. That is:

php n98-magerun2.phar db:dump –strip=”customer_address* sales_invoice_*”

Pre-defined Table Groups can also be specified to strip the tables. Table groups start with @ sign and it can be used as:

php n98-magerun2.phar db:dump –strip=”@stripped”

The table groups are predefined in the config.yaml file either in the vendor/n98/magerun2/ folder or in the n98-magerun2.phar package.

Available Table Groups:

@customers – Customer data (and company data from the B2B extension)

customer_address*
customer_entity*
customer_grid_flat
customer_log
customer_visitor
newsletter_subscriber
product_alert*
vault_payment_token*
wishlist*

@development – Removes logs, sessions, trade data and admin users so developers do not have to work with real customer data or admin user accounts

@admin
@trade
@stripped
@search

@log – Log Tables

log_url
log_url_info
log_visitor
log_visitor_info
log_visitor_online
report_event
report_compared_product_index
report_viewed_*

@search

catalogsearch_*

@sessions – Database Session Tables

core_session

@quotes – Cart (Quote) Data

quotequote_*

@sales – Sales data (orders, invoices, creditmemos etc.)

sales_order
sales_order_address
sales_order_aggregated_created
sales_order_aggregated_updated
sales_order_grid   
sales_order_item  
sales_order_payment 
sales_order_status_history 
sales_order_tax     
sales_order_tax_item     
sales_invoice       
sales_invoice_*  
sales_invoiced_*   
sales_shipment 
sales_shipment_* 
sales_shipping_*     
sales_creditmemo        
sales_creditmemo_* 
sales_recurring_*         
sales_refunded_* 
sales_payment_*   
enterprise_sales_*  
enterprise_customer_sales_* 
sales_bestsellers_*
paypal_billing_agreement*
paypal_payment_transaction
paypal_settlement_report*

@admin

admin*
authorization*

@trade – Current trade data (customers, orders and quotes). You usually do not want those in developer systems.

@customers
@sales
@quotes

@stripped

@log
@sessions

Custom Table Groups:

Along with pre-defined table groups, custom table groups can also be defined. A custom table group can be defined by creating an n98-magento2.yml file inside the Magento2 project app/etc/ folder. The file should contain the following lines:

# app/etc/n98-magerun2.yaml
# ... commands:
N98\Magento\Command\Database\DumpCommand:
table-groups:
- id: table_group_name
description: table group description 
tables: space separated list of tables
# ...

So, @table_group_name can be used in -strip argument to exclude the data specified inside that particular group.

So, above is the best way to strip all of the data that’s not needed to include in the dump to make sure that the database dump is GDPR compliant.

  • Written by: BizSpice
  • Posted on: October 30, 2018