Simple heroku app with a bash script for capturing heroku database backups and copying to your s3 bucket. Deploy this as a separate app within heroku and schedule the script to backup your production databases which exist within another heroku project.

Installation

First create a project on heroku with the heroku-buildpack-toolbelt.

heroku create my-database-backups --buildpack https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-toolbelt

Next push this project to your heroku projects git repository.

git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:josephine-database-backups.git
git push heroku master

Now we need to set some environment variables in order to get the heroku cli working properly using the [heroku-buildpack-toolbet](We are using the https://github.com/gregburek/heroku-buildpack-toolbelt.git).

heroku config:add HEROKU_TOOLBELT_API_EMAIL=your-email@gmail.com -a josephine-database-backups
heroku config:add HEROKU_TOOLBELT_API_PASSWORD=`heroku auth:token` -a josephine-database-backups

Next we need to add the amazon key and secret.

heroku config:add AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=123456 -a josephine-database-backups
heroku config:add AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1 -a josephine-database-backups
heroku config:add AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=132345verybigsecret -a josephine-database-backups

And we'll need to also set the bucket and path where we would like to store our database backups:

heroku config:add S3_BUCKET_PATH=jodb-production/pgbackups/production -a josephine-database-backups

Be careful when setting the S3_BUCKET_PATH to leave off a trailing forward slash. Amazon console s3 browser will not be able to locate your file if your directory has "//" (S3 does not really have directories.).

Configure which app is being backed up:

heroku config:add APP=josephine-production

Finally, we need to add heroku scheduler and call backup.sh on a regular interval with the appropriate database and app.

heroku addons:create scheduler -a my-database-backups

Now open it up, in your browser with:

heroku addons:open scheduler -a my-database-backups

And add the following command to run as often as you like:

DATABASE=`/app/vendor/heroku-toolbelt/bin/heroku config:get HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_MAUVE_URL -a $APP` /app/bin/backup.sh

DATABASE is the name of the database you would like to capture and backup. The database should be specified here so that we can dynamically fetch the database URL.