Import a heroku postgres database dump into a docker database container with boot2docker

Question

I'm running boot2docker on OSX 10.10. I have a database container set up so my databases don't get reset every time I start/stop a container. I would like to import a dump of a postgres database from heroku into my docker database. Is this possible to do?

Answer 1

I ended up finding this out with the help of a coworker. It's a little bit harder than just a regular old postgres database, but not much. This is based off this stackoverflow answer.

1. Generate your heroku database dump download url: heroku pgbackups:url
2. Start a bash shell on your postgres container. On my system this container was named pg: fig run db bash
3. Install curl: apt-get update && apt-get install curl
4. Download the database dump using curl: curl -o latest.dump [PASTE THE OUTPUT OF STEP 1 HERE]
5. Import the dump (note, database name and username can be found in fig.yml and database.yml respectively): pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h [YOUR BOOT2DOCKER IP] -U [YOUR_USERNAME] -d [DATABASE_NAME] latest.dump

And there you have it!

If the last step fails with some kind of invalid database error, double check latest.dump with head latest.dump. If you feel like your database is not downloading correctly, you may want to manually download it via the web gui and upload it to another host, like drop box. Then you would substitute step 1 with whatever url your dump can be found at.