ruby on rails - Is There A Faster Way To Pull Production Data From Heroku Than Taps?

Question

I often need to clone production data to investigate bugs. Even with a trivial database size heroku db:pull (taps) takes 5+ minutes and seems to have a high chance of failing. Is there an alternative method to pull the database?

Libraries for alternative processes / articles would also be appreciated.

Answer 1

Check out pgbackups. It has replaced the Heroku bundle command and will give you a the postgres equivalent of mysqldump. This is far more civilized than Taps for large datasets.

heroku pgbackups:capture

Will create a dumpfile and store it. To download the dumpfile you need the url which you get with

heroku pgbackups:url b001 (or whatever the id number of the backup is)

That will return an url from which you can download your dump. You can paste it into Firefox if you want or use curl/wget like they suggest. The use pg_restore to load the dump file into your database as they say in the docs:

pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U test_user -d myapp_development /home/mike/Downloads/b001.dump

pg_restore: connecting to database for restore