How can I make my staging and production have the same data? (Heroku)

Question

I've looked at Heroku's Taps project (http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/taps) but there's a huge constraint on foreign keys, so I'm uncomfortable with using this.

All I want to do is get my production data safely and put it on my staging app so the two are more closely matched. Advice?

Answer 1

Thoughtbot posted this a few weeks ago:

You need the pgbackups addon (free), and use this to transfer from production to staging

heroku addons:add pgbackups --remote staging
heroku addons:add pgbackups --remote production
heroku pgbackups:capture --remote production
heroku pgbackups:restore DATABASE `heroku pgbackups:url --remote production` --remote staging

Gist here: https://gist.github.com/1095522

Edit: Make sure you have your git branches "staging" and "production" pointing to the heroku apps.

git remote add production production_heroku_app
git remote add staging staging_heroku_app

Answer 2

If your staging app is using Postgre SQL as well, you can export your data as a backup using pgbackup (http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pgbackups#exporting_via_a_backup) and then just copy it into your db folder. If not, you may have to use a conversion tool.