Programatically accessing Heroku PostgreSQL from GitHub Actions

Author: simonw

heroku/programatic-access-postgresql.md

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+# Programatically accessing Heroku PostgreSQL from GitHub Actions
+
+My [db-to-sqlite](https://github.com/simonw/db-to-sqlite) tool can connect to a PostgreSQL database, export all of the content and write it to a SQLite database file on disk.
+
+I wanted to use it in a GitHub Action - but that meant I needed code running in the action workflow to be able to access my Heroku PostgreSQL database directly.
+
+It turns out the `DATABASE_URL` environment variable in Heroku has everything you need to connect to that database from elsewhere.
+
+If you have the `heroku` CLU tool installed and authenticated the following one-liner does the job:
+
+    db-to-sqlite $(heroku config:get DATABASE_URL -a simonwillisonblog) simonwillisonblog.db
+
+To configure `heroku` in a GitHub Action you need to set a `HEROKU_API_KEY` environment variable.
+
+You can create an OAuth token on your laptop like this:
+
+    % heroku authorizations:create --scope=read-protected 
+    Creating OAuth Authorization... done
+    Client:      <none>
+    ID:          4dd42e6c-5c89-4389-a9b1-4a5388b88517
+    Description: Long-lived user authorization
+    Scope:       read-protected
+    Token:       xxx copy and paste this bit xxx
+
+Then you can paste the token into a GitHub repository secret called `HEROKU_API_KEY`.
+
+Here's a fragment of my action workflow that creates the SQLite database pulling data from Heroku:
+
+```yaml
+    - name: Import Heroku DB into SQLite
+      env:
+        HEROKU_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.HEROKU_API_KEY }}
+      run: |-
+        db-to-sqlite $(heroku config:get DATABASE_URL -a simonwillisonblog) simonwillisonblog.db \
+          --table auth_permission \
+          --table auth_user \
+          --table blog_blogmark \
+          --table blog_blogmark_tags \
+          --table blog_entry \
+          --table blog_entry_tags \
+          --table blog_quotation \
+          --table blog_quotation_tags \
+          --table blog_tag \
+          --table django_content_type \
+          --table redirects_redirect
+```