Owen Conti

How To Copy Heroku Postgres Database Across Environments

Posted on under Devops by Owen Conti.

If you find yourself needing to copy a database across environments (say production to staging) you can use this one line command from Heroku:

1heroku pg:backups:restore {original_env}::{backup_id} {DATABASE_URL} --app {new_env}

Where:

  • original_env is the name of the environment you are pulling the backup from
  • backup_id is the ID of the backup, found on the Durability tab of the Heroku Postgres database page
  • DATABASE_URL is the env var that Heroku generated for the new database
  • new_env is the new application ID that has the DATABASE_URL attached to ti

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