Is it possible to have a Heroku Postgres DB replicate down to a slave DB on my laptop?

Question

I'd like to have my master Postgres DB, which is is hosted on Heroku, replicate down to a slave DB on my laptop. Is this possible?

Heroku's documentation talks about both master and slave hosted within Heroku: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-follower-databases

Someone else asked whether it's possible to have the master outside Heroku and a slave inside Heroku (it's not): Follow external database from Heroku

I haven't seen an answer for the reverse -- having the master in Heroku and the slave outside.

Why do I want this? To speed up development. With my app running locally and the DB in the cloud, the round-trip is long so data access is slow. Most data access is read-only. If I could have a local slave, it would speed things up significantly.

Related: what if my laptop is disconnected for a while? Would that cause problems for the master?

catsby · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-11 20:04:12Z

8

You cannot make a follower (slave) outside of the Heroku network – followers need superuser access to create, which Heroku Postgres doesn't provide you, so you are limited to running a follower on Heroku.

If you want to pull down a copy locally for use/inspection, you can do so with pgbackups: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-import-export

answered Feb 11, 2013 at 20:04

catsby

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bswinnerton · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-14 18:18:20Z

2

I'd highly recommend the program Parity for this.

It copies down the last Heroku backup to your local machine with a nice command line interface:

development restore production

answered Sep 14, 2015 at 18:18

bswinnerton

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Thomas Klemm · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-11 19:57:26Z

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I'd rather just pull the production database's contents from Heroku every now and then.

$ heroku db:pull

You can speed that up with a rake task.

# lib/tasks/deployment.rake
namespace :production do
  desc 'Pull the production DB to the local env'
  task :pull_db do
    puts   'Pulling PRODUCTION db to local...'
    system 'heroku db:pull --remote MY_REMOTE_NAME --confirm MY_APP_NAME'
    puts   'Pulled production db to local'
  end
end

You can call rake production:pull_db to overwrite your local development database.

answered Feb 11, 2013 at 19:57

Thomas Klemm

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2 Comments

catsby Over a year ago

Don't use db:pull. It's been removed from the documentation (for Heroku Postgres). Use pgbackups and download a copy from there, or use pg_dump yourself.

Thomas Klemm Over a year ago

Thanks for the note. I've been using this for a while and it might not be the most current way any more.

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