--- title: Download Heroku Postgres database to use locally slug: download-heroku-postgres-database-to-use-locally published_at: 2021-07-19 13:00:32 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:02 +0000 summary: description: It can be useful during development to have a dump of the production database. In this episode you’ll learn an approach to dumping a Postgres database and use that dump to restore your local pg database. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [download heroku postgres db to use locally, how to restore local postgres from heroku db, capture heroku pg backup, backup your heroku db, local copy of heroku db, Heroku, Postgres dump] views: 7379 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/download-heroku-postgres-database-to-use-locally youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMBeEReUd5w youtube_id: mMBeEReUd5w embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/mMBeEReUd5w thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mMBeEReUd5w/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Download Heroku Postgres database to use locally *Published: July 19, 2021* *Views: 7379* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMBeEReUd5w) [![Download Heroku Postgres database to use locally](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mMBeEReUd5w/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMBeEReUd5w) ## Description It can be useful during development to have a dump of the production database. In this episode you’ll learn an approach to dumping a Postgres database and use that dump to restore your local pg database. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to talk about how you can download the data that was in your heroku database and use that to update your locally running database so that uh if you're working on just a side project and you need the data that was already on heroku locally you can do so so here i just reset or dropped the database for my local copy of this form 4 data on on heroku you can see that form4.herokuap.com has all of the actual data still for all the filings and everything and so what i wanted to do is just download the database in a sort of quick and dirty way and so the way that i've done this in the past is i'll create a local bash file so i'm just going to call this like clone prodb.sh and in here this is going to be a bash file so shebang user bin n bash set dash e and then we're gonna we're gonna run a couple commands here first we wanna cr like we want to dump the prod database into a local heroku.dump file then we want to drop and recreate the local database and then finally we want to reload the data from heroku.dump into postgres okay so let's go through those each of those commands one by one when you have the heroku tool belt installed you can say heroku pg backups and this should list out all of your your backup snapshots okay so no no backups have actually been captured so in this case um i don't actually have like automatic backup capturing happening but you can schedule it to run so that it happens automatically on some periodic basis but i'm just going to run heroku pg backups capture to capture a single backup and this is going to be the backup that we want to use as our sort of snapshot okay now we can say heroku pg backups heroku pg backups public url and that should give us the public url for the backups okay so this is going to be some some giant public url for the database backups and now what we want to do is uh so you can tell too that heroku is storing these somewhere in aws so we actually want to send a curl request to this url and store the result of that download as our dump file so we're going to say something like curl heroku pg backups for the public url and we want to store the result of that in heroku.dump and that should download that whole file and it should be like pretty big and gnarly um okay so now we should have a local heroku.dump now we need to drop our locally running database um and then recreate it so we can say heroku or like rails db drop db create and that should drop our local database and then recreate it with the same name okay and then the next step is that we want to uh we want to like reload heroku.dump into this database that we just recreated into development form four tracker development we can say pg restore this is the postgres restore command we're going to restore from a dump dash dash verbose clean no acl no owner dash h localhost that's that's the host where the postgres server is running then we need to specify which database in this case it's going to be this development database and finally we need to tell it which file to backup from heroku.dump so that is going to like restore our local database from the dump that we just got off of heroku okay now if we see if we say rails s to restart the server and head back over to localhost 3000 forms i'm kicked out because i wasn't actually logged in i should be able to log in here okay so now i'm logged in and we see that there's tons of data here um and it's also got all of the form 4 data pre-filled so that is like a pretty handy tool i will throw up just a gist with the snippet of code actually oh yeah so we need to go through and actually like put this into our into our bash file our bash script so clone prod db so this is the dump command and then this is rails db drop db create and then finally we want that pg backups or pg restore command and that goes at the bottom here all right so i will put this into a gist in case that is useful to other folks and we'll share it out otherwise you just kind of run it with dot slash clone prod db and that will execute each of those commands to download and clone your heroku database into something locally again you really just want to use this for tiny tiny like side projects where it's mostly just you anytime you have sensitive user data or you're collecting sensitive data from customers or something and you would not want your team to have access to something like this just for security purposes so you would likely want to create some tool that built out a local dev box environment but when you're messing around with stuff locally and you've got some real data on heroku it can be nice to have just uh just that that data locally cool so thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## 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