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.

Now using aws cli v2 - works with both heroku-18 and heroku-20 stacks.

Installation

First, clone this project, then change directory into the newly created directory:

git clone https://github.com/kbaum/heroku-database-backups.git
cd heroku-database-backups

Create a project on heroku.

heroku create my-database-backups

Add the heroku-buildpack-cli:

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

Next push this project to your heroku projects git repository.

heroku git:remote -a my-database-backups
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 -d my-database-backups` -a my-database-backups

Next we need to add the amazon key and secret from the IAM user that you are using:

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.).

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.

Optional

You can add a HEARTBEAT_URL to the script so a request gets sent every time a backup is made. All you have to do is add the variable value like:

heroku config:add HEARTBEAT_URL=https://hearbeat.url -a my-database-backups

If you are using heroku's scheduled backups you might only want to archive the latest backup to S3 for long-term storage. Set the ONLY_CAPTURE_TO_S3 variable when running the command:

ONLY_CAPTURE_TO_S3=true APP=your-app DATABASE=HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_NAVY_URL /app/bin/backup.sh

Tip

The default timezone is UTC. To use your preferred timezone in the filename timestamp, set the TZ variable when calling the command:

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