Restore a Heroku Database Locally

Sometimes a post is just for me, and this is likely one of those posts. Several of my open source projects run on Heroku, and I often want to pull down a copy of the production database and restore it locally. There are some Heroku-proprietary commands required to do this, and I often find myself visiting Google or Stack Overflow to get it done. These days, this is explained in the Heroku docs, but in case that goes away, here’s how to do the restore.

These commands assume a Postgres database.

First, capture a backup and download it.

$ heroku pg:backups:capture
$ heroku pg:backups:download

Next, create a local database to restore to. I don’t want to lose my development data!

$ createdb prod_backup

And finally, restore:

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

Happy databasing.

Blog of Jake Worth, software engineer in Maine.