How do I access Heroku Postgres DB from an external application using latest credentials?

Question

I am building an ETL Application that needs to fetch data from Heroku Postgres DB a few times a day but the application is not running on Heroku, I am already able to do this, but using the current credentials, but heroku states that the credentials are not permanent and will be rotated from time to time.

What is the best way to do this, building a REST API on top of my app is not viable an option. I have seen that Heroku provides a config vars API which I could potentially use to fetch the DB credentials, but is there a simpler/cleaner way for implementing this, is enforcing permanent credentials an option?

Stan Mazhara · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-20 22:40:05Z

1

There is no way to enforce it. And it's not a question of credentials, but a question of a database hostname. It's ec2.

Your safest bet is to always fetch current DATABASE_URL from your Heroku app. If you only need to do it 'a few times a day' this is not a problem.

answered Feb 20, 2018 at 22:40

Stan Mazhara

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3 Comments

Simon Ndunda Over a year ago

What is the most secure way to fetch the DATABASE_URL from heroku?

Stan Mazhara Over a year ago

The best way to do this is to use their platform-api (devcenter.heroku.com/articles/…) You can call it from the shell using curl as in their example or using heroku config:get DATABASE_URL command. Or you can use your preferred language library.

Simon Ndunda Over a year ago

Thanks, this us what I ended up doing and it is working well for me so far

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