Heroku DB pull alternative

I often clone my production data to play with during development. Even though my database is small the heroku db:pull takes ages. Don’t worry though because there is a free and easy alternative (If your development database is postgres). It’s called PG Backups

To get up and running with PG Backups do the following

Install

$ heroku addons:add pgbackups

Backup

$ heroku pgbackups:capture

View

$ heroku pgbackups

Download

$ heroku pgbackups:url b001

Restore

$ pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h myhost -U myuser -d mydb latest.dump

Delete (If you wanted to)

$ heroku pgbackups:destroy b001

If you don’t have postgres as your back-end for development I suggest you do because it’s awesome and Heroku use it as your production database anyway.

-Matt