Our Blog

Heroku: dumping production database to staging

By Marina Lohova
June 17, 2015

If you need to dump the production database locally Heroku has a nice set of tools to make this as smooth as humanly possible. In short, remember these two magic words: pg:pull and pg:push. This article details the process https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#pg-push-and-pg-pull

However, when I first tried it I had to resolved few issues.

My first problem was:

pg:pull not found

To fix this:

1. Uninstall the “heroku” gem with

gem uninstall heroku (Select 'All Versions')

2. Find your Ruby “bin” path by running

gem env

(it’s under “EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY:”)

3. Cd to the “bin” folder.

4. Remove the Heroku executable with

rm heroku

5. Restart your shell (close Terminal tab and re-open)

6. Type

heroku version

you should now see something like:

heroku-toolbelt/2.33.1 (x86_64-darwin10.8.0) ruby/1.9.3

Now you can proceed with the transfer:

1. Type

heroku config --app production-app

Note the DATABASE_URL, for example let’s imagine that the production database url is HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_KANYE_URL, and the staging database url is HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_NORTH

2. Run

heroku pg:pull HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_KANYE rtwtransferdb --app production-app
heroku config --app staging-app
heroku pg:push rtwtransferdb HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_NORTH --app rtwtest

This is when I hit the second problem:

database is not empty

I fixed it by doing:

heroku pg:reset HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_NORTH

Happy database dumping!

database heroku