Pushing a single table to Heroku

Question

I am aware of the heroku pg:push command which pushes an entire database up to Heroku.

Now that I am launching my product, I would like to be able to push up only a specific table that contains information collected locally without overwriting existing tables (such as users).

Is there a command that enables me to only push specific tables to heroku?

Answer 1

My suggestion is to use PostgreSQL dump/restore capabilities directly using the pg_dump and psql commands.

With pg_dump you can dump a specific table from your local database

$ pg_dump --data-only --table=products sourcedb > products.sql

Then grab the Heroku PostgreSQL connection string from the configs

$ heroku config | grep HEROKU_POSTGRESQL

# example
# postgres://user3123:[email protected]:6212/db982398

and restore the table in the remote database, using the information retrieved from Heroku.

$ psql -h ec2-117-21-174-214.compute-1.amazonaws.com -p 6212 -U user3123 db982398 < products.sql

You will need to customize the -p, -h and -U parameters, as well as the database name. The password will be prompted by psql.

You can also use the pg_restore to filter a dump and restore the table, but I personally prefer psql.

Note that Heroku is recommending the use of PostgreSQL tools in several documentations, such as Importing and Exporting for large data, or whenever the provided CLI commands don't cover specific cases like the one in this question.