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.

heroku create my-database-backups

Add the heroku-buildpack-cli and the AWS cli buildpack:

heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-cli -a  my-database-backups
heroku buildpacks:add heroku-community/awscli -a my-database-backups

If you plan to backup Mlab MongoDB databases as well, add the mongodb buildpack

heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/o5r/heroku-buildpack-mongo -a my-database-backups

Next push this project to your heroku projects git repository.

git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:my-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-cli.

heroku config:add HEROKU_API_KEY=`heroku auth:token` -a my-database-backups

This creates a token that will quietly expire in one year. To create a long-lived authorization token instead, do this:

heroku config:add HEROKU_API_KEY=`heroku authorizations:create -S -s read -d my-database-backups` -a my-database-backups

(NOTE: this authorization token will allow only read operations)

Next we need to add the amazon key and secret.

heroku config:add AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=123456 -a my-database-backups
heroku config:add AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1 -a my-database-backups
heroku config:add AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=132345verybigsecret -a my-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=my-db-backup-bucket/backups -a my-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.).

You may add a GPG passphrase if you want an extra layer of security, your backup files will be encrypted with this passphrase before being sent to Amazon:

heroku config:add GPG_PASSPHRASE="SeCrEtPasSpHrasE" -a my-database-backups

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:

APP=your-app DATABASE=HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_NAVY_URL /app/bin/backup.sh

In the above command, APP is the name of your app within heroku that contains the database. DATABASE is the name of the database you would like to capture and backup. In our setup, DATABASE actually points to a follower database to avoid any impact to our users. Both of these environment variables can also be set within your heroku config rather than passing into the script invocation.

Backup large databases

If you have quite a large database plan with continuous protection already enabled, logical backups are likely to fail. In that cas you can rely on Heroku continuous backup and use that alternative script:

APP=your-app ./bin/fetch_latest_backup.sh

This will just copy the latest database backup to S3

Backup MongoDB databases (mLab only for the moment)

APP=your-app /app/bin/mongo_backup.sh