When working with a Rails app, sometimes you need to debug a production problem regarding production data. One way to do that without touching the production code is to dump all the data from the production database and mount it locally.
The following code works only for the PostgreSQL database vendor.
Your database is on Heroku
Edit: this is now built-in in the heroku command-line, thanks @will for pointing it out!
You can add this rake task to your code:
Then run it with
$ rake db:import_from_heroku
Your database is on AWS RDS
You probably use that if you are on Elastic Beanstalk or EC2 instances you built. With the following, I suppose you are on Mac OSX and you stored your
postgresql admin password into the Apple Keychain. You can adapt those commands to your setup
by ignoring the PGPASSWORD environment variable and providing manually the password to the
pg_dump command.
$ export PGPASSWORD=`security find-generic-password -l "postgresql://YOUR_INSTANCE.AWS_REGION.rds.amazonaws.com" -g 2>&1 | grep "password" | cut -d \" -f 2`
$ pg_dump -i -h YOUR_INSTANCE.AWS_REGION.rds.amazonaws.com -U DATABASE_USER -d DATABASE_SCHEMA -F c -b -v -f prod.dump
$ unset PGPASSWORD
$ pg_restore -i -h localhost --clean --no-acl --no-owner -d LOCAL_DATABASE_SCHEMA -v prod.dump
$ rm prod.dump
Enjoy!