At work, we’ve recently switched from Engine Yard AppCloud to Heroku. One of the things we’ve been missing is daily database dumps. Heroku does provide you with an addon called PG Backups. The basic free version will retain 2 postgres backups, which you have to kick off manually.

There’s a gem created by @ddollar (now maintained by joemsak) called heroku_backup_task. This gem adds a rake task that captures a new database backup in the PG Backup addon and expires the oldest one.

Here’s how you install it:

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gem "heroku_backup_task"

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require "heroku_backup_task/tasks"
task :cron => :heroku_backup

If you enable the basic cron addon, it’ll run this daily and you’ll always have the last 2 days worth of PG backups. That’s great, but I want more than the last 2 days worth.

To solve this problem, I originally forked the heroku_tools project, fixing a few bugs, but this was just a rake task you had to include manually and it only supported s3. Then I forked heroku_s3_backup and swapped out right_aws for fog, mainly because I wanted to learn how to use the fog gem. This worked better since it was gemified, but the name tied it to s3. So I set out to create a new gem.

Introducing Heroku Cloud Backup

The heroku_cloud_backup gem also adds a rake task to your project, but supports all the cloud storage providers that fog supports. It’s also a lot more configurable through the heroku config. The heroku:cloud_backup task, when called, will upload the latest PG Backup capture to the cloud using fog. Currently, it supports Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, and Google Storage.

Installation

It’s recommended that you use this gem in conjunction with the heroku_backup_task gem. First, you need to enable the Heroku PGBackups addon:

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$ heroku addons:add pgbackups:basic

If you want this to run daily, you’ll need to enable the Heroku cron addon:

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$ heroku addons:add cron:daily

For Rails 3.x, add this to your Gemfile:

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gem 'heroku_backup_task'
gem 'heroku_cloud_backup'

For Rails 2.x, add this to your in your environment.rb:

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config.gem 'heroku_backup_task'
config.gem 'heroku_cloud_backup'

In your Rakefile:

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require "heroku_backup_task"
require "heroku_cloud_backup"

task :cron do
  HerokuBackupTask.execute
  HerokuCloudBackup.execute
end

Usage

The first thing you’ll want to do is configure the addon.

HCB_PROVIDER (aws, rackspace, google) - Add which provider you’re using. Required

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$ heroku config:add HCB_PROVIDER='aws' # or 'google' or 'rackspace'

HCB_BUCKET (alphanumberic characters, dashes, period, underscore are allowed, between 3 and 255 characters long) - Select a bucket name to upload to. This the bucket or root directory that your files will be stored in. If the bucket doesn’t exist, it will be created. Required

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$ heroku config:add HCB_BUCKET='mywebsite'

HCB_PREFIX (Defaults to “db”) - The direction prefix for where the backups are stored. This is so you can store your backups within a specific sub directory within the bucket. heroku_cloud_backup will also append the ENV var of the database to the path, so you can backup multiple databases, by their ENV names. Optional

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$ heroku config:add HCB_PREFIX='backups/pg'

HCB_MAX (Defaults to no limit) - The number of backups to store before the script will prune out older backups. A value of 10 will allow you to store 10 of the most recent backups. Newer backups will replace older ones. Optional

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$ heroku config:add HCB_MAX=10

Depending on which provider you specify, you’ll need to provide different login credentials.

For Amazon:

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$ heroku config:add HCB_KEY1="aws_access_key_id"
$ heroku config:add HCB_KEY2="aws_secret_access_key"

For Rackspace:

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$ heroku config:add HCB_KEY1="rackspace_username"
$ heroku config:add HCB_KEY2="rackspace_api_key"

For Google Storage:

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$ heroku config:add HCB_KEY1="google_storage_secret_access_key"
$ heroku config:add HCB_KEY2="google_storage_access_key_id"

You can run this manually like this:

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$ heroku rake heroku_backup
$ heroku rake heroku:cloud_backup

How do I go about restoring a backup?

I would recommend you create a temporarily public url from your cloud storage. I do this with Cyberduck. It has a neat feature where you can right click on a file and it’ll generate temporarily accessible urls to that file, with the auth params for it. So once you have that url you can store like this:

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$ heroku pgbackups:restore SHARED_DATABASE 'http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/db/2011-06-09-014500.dump?authparameters'

Hopefully this gem will be of use to someone. If you have any problems or feature requests, you can post them on the Github Issues page set up for the project.