Homebrew Setup

You'll need to install Postgresql on your laptop.

$ brew update
$ brew install postgresql
$ initdb /usr/local/var/postgres

Note

By default, Postgresql installed through homebrew uses the same user account which you install postgresql with in homebrew (e.g. waynebot). This is fine for the development environment, but shouldn't be used in production.

Launch Postgresql

I typically don't have Postgresql launch on startup as it takes system resources I don't always want to yield for that convenience. Instead of running the pg_ctl, I tend to run postgresql when I need it with the following:

$ postgres -D /usr/local/var/postgres

Create a backup

The Postgresql backups operate on your primary database (at the DATABASE_URL config var location). To start a backup, execute the capture task in the heroku toolkit.

$ heroku pgbackups:capture --app [app-name]

HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_BLACK (DATABASE_URL)  ----backup--->  b251

Capturing... done
Storing... done

Download the backup

Download the latest dump from the DATABASE_URL:

$ curl -o latest.dump `heroku pgbackups:url --app [app-name]`

Restore the local copy

You can load the data using the pg_restore tool.

$ pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U user -d prism latest.dump

Further Reading

• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pgbackups
• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-import-export