MCP for Akeeba Backup Core is a free add-on for MCP for J that lets your AI client take and inspect backups of your Joomla site. Seven tools cover your backup profiles, the record of every backup the site has ever taken, and running a new one โ so "back it up before we touch anything" becomes something you say rather than something you go off and do. The backup runs through Akeeba's own engine in the same stepped loop the admin screen drives from JavaScript, which is why a backup of a real site finishes instead of dying at the tool-call timeout.
Why this exists
The moment you most want a fresh backup is the moment before you change something, and that's exactly the moment when going to fetch one breaks your concentration. Akeeba Backup Core does ship a JSON API โ it's the one their RemoteCLI tool talks to โ but it sits outside Joomla and wants its own client and its own secret key, so it solves the problem for scripts and not for you. There was nothing inside Joomla an MCP client could simply ask. This add-on boots Akeeba's engine in-process and drives the same models the admin screens drive, so the backup your AI client takes is the same backup you'd have taken by hand.
What Claude can do
Seven tools, in four groups.
| Area | Tools | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Profiles | 2 | List every backup profile on the site, and read one in full including the serialized engine configuration behind it. |
| Backup records | 2 | List backup attempts with their status, archive name, size, and whether the archive is still on disk. Read one record in detail. |
| Running a backup | 2 | Start a backup against a profile, then advance it a step at a time until the engine reports it's done. |
| Housekeeping | 1 | Delete a backup โ either the record and its archive together, or just the archive files, keeping the record for sites where you've already copied the archive off-site. |
Installing it
You'll need Joomla 5 or 6, PHP 8.2 or later, MCP for J, and Akeeba Backup Core itself, which is free from Akeeba Ltd.
- Open Components โ MCP for Joomla โ Browse MCP Add-Ons and click Install on this add-on. You can also download the ZIP above and install it through System โ Install โ Extensions.
- That's the whole install. The plugin enables itself, and the tools show up in your connected AI client the next time it lists them.
There's no admin screen for this plugin, by design โ it adds tools to MCP for J rather than a place to click. If Akeeba Backup isn't installed, the tools don't throw a database error at you; each one says Akeeba Backup isn't on this site and tells you where to get it.
Using it
Ask for what you want in plain language. "Take a backup before we update Joomla" starts one and drives it to completion, reporting progress as it goes. "When did this site last back up successfully, and is the archive still on disk?" reads the record list. "Free up some space โ drop the archives from before August but keep the records" is the files-only delete.
Deletes are the one place to be careful, and Akeeba helps. A backup marked frozen is protected from pruning, and this add-on refuses to delete a frozen record rather than quietly overriding the flag โ if you really mean it, unfreeze it in the Akeeba admin first.
Why a backup takes several calls
Akeeba's backup engine is deliberately step-based. Each tick does a bounded amount of work โ usually five to fifteen seconds, set by the profile's own maximum execution time โ and then returns, so a backup of any size gets there in increments rather than one long blocking run. That's how the admin screen's progress bar works, and it's why a browser tab doesn't have to hold a single request open for ten minutes.
The tools keep that shape instead of hiding it. Starting a backup does the engine setup and the first tick and hands back an identifier; stepping advances it one tick and reports the engine's own status โ which phase it's in, any warnings, a progress estimate, and whether it has finished. Your AI client loops on that until the engine says it's done. A single blocking "back up the site" call would be simpler to describe and would time out on every site worth backing up.
One vendor quirk gets absorbed along the way. Akeeba stamps each backup record with where it came from, and it works that out by inspecting the running context. Joomla's API application isn't a context it recognises, so it falls through and labels the backup as if it came from cron โ which would make backups you asked for indistinguishable from scheduled ones in the record list. The add-on sets the origin the same way Akeeba's own backup controller does, so an MCP-triggered backup is identifiable afterwards.
What it doesn't do
There's no restore tool, and that's not an oversight. Akeeba Backup Core has no in-admin restore at all โ restoring an archive means uploading and running their separate Kickstart script on the server, usually on a site that is by definition already broken. That's not a process a tool call can usefully drive, so this add-on doesn't pretend to.
It also knows when it's the wrong answer. The catalog entry names Akeeba Backup Pro as the thing that supersedes it, so on a site where Pro is installed, Browse MCP Add-Ons hides the Install button and tags the entry "Superseded by Akeeba Backup Pro" instead. Pro covers the same ground and more, and installing a Core wrapper on top of it would just give you a redundant set of tools.
Open source
GPL-2.0-or-later, the same license as Joomla itself. Source lives on GitHub.
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