There are a lot of examples of ways to automatically back up your PostgreSQL database on Heroku using the PG Backups and pushing them up to S3, then pulling them back into your local database. This offers a lot of flexibility but you need to have Amazon S3, and I don’t.

Looking for something simple to fit my needs

I found a stackoverflow question that had a great answer from Mike Williamson that Jack Kinsella made into a simple bash script.

My solution

Jack’s script was almost perfect but I made a few tweaks and thought I would share it here.

#!/bin/bash

heroku pgbackups:capture --expire

function backup_url () {
  heroku pgbackups | tail -n 1 | cut -d'|' -f 1
}

echo 'Downloading backup...'
curl $(heroku pgbackups:url $backup_url) > temporary_backup.dump
echo 'Restoring backup...'
pg_restore --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -d DATABASE temporary_backup.dump
rm -f temporary_backup.dump