How to use heroku postgres database locally.

August 18, 2023

When we work a project that is deployed on heroku, we need do use database locally. And heroku give the the option to download the database file as a dump file and use that on our local machine. In this tutorial we will see how we can download the database from heroku and use that in our development environment. Let's Start 🚀

Step -1 (Login to heroku)

The First Step is to login into heroku from local machine with heroku cli.

heroku login

Step - 2 (Capture and Download Backup with PGBackups)

To export the data from your Heroku Postgres database, we need to create a backup and download it to our local machine: we can do that with the following command.

Capture the data of our application

heroku pg:backups:capture --app example-app

Download the captured data

  heroku pg:backups:download --app example-app

replace your app name with example-app

with this a new file will be downloaded to your local machine, the file name will be something like latest.dump.

Step - 3 (Drop and recreate your existing database)

No we need to reset our local databases. run the following to command to reset.

rails db:drop
rails db:create

Step - 4 (Restore the database)

With the pg_restore tool we will restore the database to our app.

pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -d mydatabase_development latest.dump

This will ask for the postgres database password. provide the pasword. and bang!

mydatabase_development is your local database name, you can get that inside config/database.yml file.

change mydatabase_development with your database name.

Step - 5 (Run Migration )

Now rum rails migration

rails db:migrate

It's all done. Now run the application. and all the data will be in your local site 😊😊😊.

Thank You.

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