Working on a rails app locally with a remote Postgres connection?

Question

Is there a way to configure the database.yml file to connect to Heroku's Postgres remotely?

I'm having trouble understanding how Heroku, Rails and PG gem work together.

It looks like during deployment, Heroku re-writes the database.yml file - is it possible to see the contents of this updated .yml file and use it locally?

score 29 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 08 '18 at 05:35

Below are the steps to access Heroku db from local development:

Login to your heroku account.
Navigate to this URL https://postgres.heroku.com/databases/ OR you can get heroku db url by running this command in the terminal: heroku pg:credentials:url
Select your application database.

You will able to see your heroku pg credentials:

Host         xxxxxxxxx.77777.amazonaws.com
Database     42feddfddeee 
Username         44444444444
Port         xxxx
Password     777sfsadferwefsdferwefsdf

collect above details and put in your databse.yml file development evn:

adapter: postgresql  
host: < host >                            # HOST 
port: < port >                            # Port  
database: < database name >               # Database Name  
username: < user_name >                   # User Name  
password: '< password >'                  # Password

Restart you application,

Best of luck..!!

Thanks. For anyone reading this: Take care to use "username:" and not "user:" in database.yml or it will try to connect you with your system name — dsp_099, Oct 21 '13 at 20:23

Litmus · Answer 2 · 2013-10-21T06:20:21.343

I am not a postgres user but this should work. You can alter your database.yml to include host and port

production:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: di_production
  pool: 5
  username: user
  password:
  host: heroku.host.name
  port: <postgres listen port>

And of course, you should allow connection on the server side, both at the firewall level and database level.

A simple hack to see contents of #{Rails.root}/config/database.yml is to write code to load this yml into an object, then print it out on the UI

DB_CONFIG = YAML.load(File.read("#{Rails.root}/config/database.yml", __FILE__))
puts DB_CONFIG["production"].inspect  # or what ever method you want to print it

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 21 '13 at 06:12

I am a bit of a newbie and may have misunderstood your question - but. Developed a ROR application using postgress database. Then uploaded to Heroku. I ran DB/Migrate/schema.rb to set up the remote Postgresql database.

From memory heroku run rake db:init (but I could be wrong). Whenver I update the database in develpment to get update in Heroku I have to promote code and run heroku run rake db:migrate

From my config/dtabase.yml

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: di_development
  pool: 5
  username: davidlee
  password:
test:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: di_test
  pool: 5
  username: davidlee
  password:
production:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: di_production
  pool: 5
  username: user
  password:

and it works. I can't remember doing anything else.

Pierre

Working on a rails app locally with a remote Postgres connection?

3 Answers3