Pushing a single table to Heroku

My suggestion is to use PostgreSQL dump/restore capabilities directly using the pg_dump and psql commands.

With pg_dump you can dump a specific table from your local database

$ pg_dump --data-only --table=products sourcedb > products.sql

Then grab the Heroku PostgreSQL connection string from the configs

$ heroku config | grep HEROKU_POSTGRESQL# example# postgres://user3123:passkja83kd8@ec2-117-21-174-214.compute-1.amazonaws.com:6212/db982398

and restore the table in the remote database, using the information retrieved from Heroku.

$ psql -h ec2-117-21-174-214.compute-1.amazonaws.com -p 6212 -U user3123 db982398 < products.sql

You will need to customize the -p, -h and -U parameters, as well as the database name. The password will be prompted by psql.

You can also use the pg_restore to filter a dump and restore the table, but I personally prefer psql.

Note that Heroku is recommending the use of PostgreSQL tools in several documentations, such as Importing and Exporting for large data, or whenever the provided CLI commands don't cover specific cases like the one in this question.

I wrote script which extracts DB url from heroku. Then it dumps single tables from production and restores them on development/localhost. Run it like this:

rake production_to_development:run\['users;news;third_table',my-sushi-app\]

Code:

namespace :production_to_development do  task :run, [:tables, :app] => [:environment] do |t, args|    tables = args["tables"].split(';')    database_url = nil    Bundler.with_clean_env { database_url = `heroku config:get DATABASE_URL --app=#{args["app"]}` }    require 'addressable/uri'    uri = Addressable::URI.parse(database_url)    remote_database = uri.path[1,uri.path.length-2] # there is \n at the end of the path!    tables.each do |table|      backup_file = "tmp/#{table}.backup"      #bin_dir = "/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/bin"      bin_dir = ""      dump_command = "PGPASSWORD=#{uri.password} #{bin_dir}/pg_dump --file \"#{backup_file}\" --host \"#{uri.host}\" --port \"#{uri.port}\" --username \"#{uri.user}\" --no-password --verbose --format=c --blobs --table \"public.#{table}\" \"#{remote_database}\""      `#{dump_command}`      `psql -U 'root' -d my_table -c 'drop table if exists #{table}'`      `pg_restore -d my_table --no-owner  #{backup_file}`    end  endend

If I understand correctly, you just need a single database table with its locally created data pushed to your Rails production app. Maybe this is a simplistic approach, but you could create a migration for your table and then populate using db/seeds.rb.

After you've populated the seeds.rb file and pushed your repo to heroku:

heroku run rake db:migrateheroku run rake db:seed

Also, if your local table has a ton of data and you're using Rails 4, check out the seed dump gem: https://github.com/rroblak/seed_dump. This will take your existing db data and map it to the seed format.