Migrate from Heroku to Neon Postgres

This guide describes how to import your data from Heroku Postgres to Neon.

New feature

If you are looking to migrate your database to Neon, you may want to try our new Migration Assistant, which can help. Read the guide to learn more.

The instructions assume that you have installed the Heroku CLI, which is used to transfer data from Heroku. For installation instructions, see The Heroku CLI.

To migrate your data from Heroku to Neon:

Create a Neon project and copy the connection string
Retrieve your Heroku app name and database name
Import your data
Verify that your data was imported

Create a Neon project and copy the connection string

Navigate to the Projects page in the Neon Console.
Click New Project.
Specify your project settings and click Create Project.
After creating a project, you are directed to the Neon Dashboard, where a connection string with your password is provided under Connection Details. Copy the connection string. It is required to import your data from Heroku.

The example connection string used the instructions that follow is:
```
postgresql://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-123456.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname
```

Retrieve your Heroku app name and database name

Log in to Heroku and select the project you want to import data from.
Select Overview and copy the name of the Heroku Postgres database, which appears under Installed add-ons.
Click Settings and copy your Heroku App Name.

note

You can also retrieve the Heroku Postgres database name using the following Heroku CLI command:

heroku pg:links --app <app>

where <app> is the Heroku App Name.

For example:

$ heroku pg:links --app thawing-wave-57227
=== postgresql-trapezoidal-48645

Import your data

From your terminal, run the following Heroku CLI command:

heroku pg:pull --app [app] [heroku-pg-database] [neon-connection-string]

where:

[app] is the name of the Heroku app
[heroku-pg-database] is the name of the Heroku PostgreSQL database
[neon-connection-string] is the Neon connection string

For example:

$ heroku pg:pull --app thawing-wave-57227 postgresql-trapezoidal-48645 postgresql://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-123456.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname

heroku-cli: Pulling postgresql-trapezoidal-48645 ---> postgresql://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-123456.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname

pg_dump: last built-in OID is 16383
pg_dump: reading extensions
pg_dump: identifying extension members
pg_dump: reading schemas
pg_dump: reading user-defined tables
pg_dump: reading user-defined functions
pg_dump: reading user-defined types
pg_dump: reading procedural languages
pg_dump: reading user-defined aggregate functions
pg_dump: reading user-defined operators
pg_dump: reading user-defined access methods
pg_dump: reading user-defined operator classes
pg_dump: reading user-defined operator families
pg_dump: reading user-defined text search parsers
pg_dump: reading user-defined text search templates
pg_dump: reading user-defined text search dictionaries
pg_dump: reading user-defined text search configurations
pg_dump: reading user-defined foreign-data wrappers
pg_dump: reading user-defined foreign servers
pg_dump: reading default privileges
pg_dump: reading user-defined collations
pg_dump: reading user-defined conversions
pg_dump: reading type casts
pg_dump: reading transforms
pg_dump: reading table inheritance information
pg_dump: reading event triggers
pg_dump: finding extension tables
pg_dump: finding inheritance relationships
pg_dump: reading column info for interesting tables
pg_dump: finding the columns and types of table "public.customer"
pg_dump: finding the columns and types of table "public.order"
pg_dump: flagging inherited columns in subtables
pg_dump: reading indexes
pg_dump: reading indexes for table "public.customer"
pg_dump: reading indexes for table "public.order"
pg_dump: flagging indexes in partitioned tables
pg_dump: reading extended statistics
pg_dump: reading constraints
pg_dump: reading foreign key constraints for table "public.customer"
pg_dump: reading foreign key constraints for table "public.order"
pg_dump: reading triggers
pg_dump: reading triggers for table "public.customer"
pg_dump: reading triggers for table "public.order"
pg_dump: reading rewrite rules
pg_dump: reading policies
pg_dump: reading row-level security policies
pg_dump: reading publications
pg_dump: reading publication membership
pg_dump: reading subscriptions
pg_dump: reading large objects
pg_dump: reading dependency data
pg_dump: saving encoding = UTF8
pg_dump: saving standard_conforming_strings = on
pg_dump: saving search_path =
pg_dump: saving database definition
pg_dump: dumping contents of table "public.customer"
pg_restore: connecting to database for restore
pg_dump: dumping contents of table "public.order"
pg_restore: creating SCHEMA "heroku_ext"
pg_restore: creating TABLE "public.customer"
pg_restore: creating TABLE "public.order"
pg_restore: processing data for table "public.customer"
pg_restore: processing data for table "public.order"
pg_restore: creating CONSTRAINT "public.customer customer_pkey"
pg_restore: creating CONSTRAINT "public.order order_pkey"
pg_restore: creating FK CONSTRAINT "public.order order_customer_id_fkey"
heroku-cli: Pulling complete.

Verify that your data was imported

Log in to the Neon Console.
Select the Neon project that you transferred data to.
Select the Tables tab.
In the sidebar, verify that your database tables appear under the Tables heading.

Need help?

Join our Discord Server to ask questions or see what others are doing with Neon. Users on paid plans can open a support ticket from the console. For more details, see Getting Support.