How can I get a plain text postgres database dump on heroku?

Question

Due to version incompatibilities of my postgres database on heroku (9.1) and my local installation (8.4) I need a plain text sql database dump file so I can put a copy of my

Answer 1

You could just make your own pg_dump directly from your Heroku database.

First, get your postgres string using heroku config:get DATABASE_URL.

Look for the Heroku Postgres url (example: HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_RED_URL: postgres://user3123:passkja83kd8@ec2-117-21-174-214.compute-1.amazonaws.com:6212/db982398), which format is postgres://:@:/.

Next, run this on your command line:

pg_dump --host= --port= --username= --password --dbname= > output.sql

The terminal will ask for your password then run it and dump it into output.sql.

Then import it:

psql -d my_local_database -f output.sql