Back up your Heroku databases with a shell script

Please note that since writing this article I have created a shell script that downloads all your Heroku and Dokku Postgres databases and uploads them to Google Drive. You can check it out here.

Original article

If your Heroku app isn’t professional tier, backups get a little more labour intensive. You will need to manually backup and download your databases and store them yourself.To help me do this, I wrote a shell script.

First you need to create a shell script

touch backupdb.sh

open it

gedit backupdb.sh

Paste in the following code (Just replace the app1 app2 app3 etc. with the names of the apps you with to back up).

The script:

• creates a folder named after today's date
• loops once per app name
  • backs up the app
  • copies the backup url
  • downloads the backup

#!/bin/bash

apps=(app1 app2 app3)
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
mkdir -p "${DATE}"
for i in ${apps[@]}; do
   heroku pg:backups:capture --app ${i}
   url=$(heroku pg:backups:url --app ${i})
   wget -O $DATE/${i} $url
done

Make the script executable

chmod +x backupdb.sh

and run it!

./backupdb.sh

Check out Heroku for more indepth information

Written by Alan Vardy. Let me know how I can make this better!