I have an initial set of production data stored locally in the development database that I'd like to migrate to production for a starting point for data. What's the best way to transfer this data?
It does not seem evident if there is a way to use pgbackups as per the instructions. Perhaps I have to run a manual backup of some sort locally and then push it over with pgbackups and if that is the case, I'd appreciate some specific instructions on accomplishing this.
After some additional digging and an answer from Heroku, the answer for importation of initial data is to:
1) If using PGSQL locally, first dump the data:
pg_dump -U your_username your_database_name -f backup.sql
2) Then follow the instructions found here for importation to Heroku's database: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pgbackups#importing_from_a_backup
First dump your local database using pg_dump:
pg_dump -Fc --no-acl --no-owner -h ... mydb > mydb.dump
and then use heroku pgbackups:restore:
heroku pgbackups:restore heroku-database-url url-to-your-mydb.dump-file
Note that the mydb.dump file needs to be accessible by the Heroku servers.
The Heroku Dev Center page has detailed instructions:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-import-export
db:push might be dangerous if you already have production data but you don't have any so there's nothing to overwrite or lose. I'm not familiar with replication at Heroku.