Import Heroku Postgres backup locally

Some days ago I accidentally dropped my development database and lost all test data. Not having any seed files I just dumped the production data from Heroku and imported it locally. Here is how.

Well, this post is nothing new. This is mainly copied from the Heroku documentation. This post serves mostly as reference for me but I hope you also find it helpful.

Dump a backup

heroku pg:backups capture
curl -o latest.dump `heroku pg:backups public-url`

Restore locally

# choose:

# found on Stackoverflow (tested and worked)
pg_restore -O -d mydb latest.dump

# from Heroku docs
pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U myuser -d mydb latest.dump

This will usually generate some warnings, due to differences between your Heroku database and a local database, but they are generally safe to ignore.

Enjoy!