Today I worked out how to use the Heroku pg:pull command and Postgres.app to pull a Heroku backup to my laptop.
Postgres.app is the easiest way I know to run a PostgreSQL server on macOS: just install using the installer, then click the "Initialize" button in the UI.
Assuming you have the Heroku CLI installed, the heroku pg:pull command can pull a Heroku database backup and load it into a local database.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#pg-push-and-pg-pull tells you that you need the following:
heroku pg:pull HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_MAGENTA mylocaldb --app sushi
The app name is your app name (whatever comes before .herokuapp.com).
I found my all-caps environment variable by running the following:
heroku run env -a simonwillisonblog | grep POSTGRESQL
Running env on simonwillisonblog... up, run.2963 (Hobby)
HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_JADE_URL=postgres://....
Then I ran this command:
heroku pg:pull HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_JADE_URL simonwillisonblog -a simonwillisonblog
This created a local PostgreSQL database called simonwillisonblog and imported my latest backup.
When I ran it a second time I had to use dropdb simonwillisonblog first to drop the existing local database.
I ran this flow on a new computer (with a fresh install of Postgres.app) and got the following error:
% heroku pg:pull HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_JADE_URL simonwillisonblog -a simonwillisonblog
heroku-cli: Pulling postgresql-animate-15868 ---> simonwillisonblog
/bin/sh: createdb: command not found
I fixed this by temporarily adding /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/15/bin to my path, like this:
PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/15/bin \
heroku pg:pull HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_JADE_URL simonwillisonblog -a simonwillisonblog
Created 2020-07-10T17:16:13-07:00, updated 2023-02-06T09:49:20-08:00 · History · Edit