A simple bash script to replicate your heroku database onto your development database. Stick it in to your scripts folder in a rails app and chmod+x it. Then you can run ./script/replicate and debug any production issues with the production data.

replicate

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo "Running: heroku pgbackups:capture --remote production"
heroku pgbackups:capture --remote production

echo "curl'ing the latest.dump"
curl -o latest.dump `heroku pgbackups:url --remote production`

echo "restoring the dump"
pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U postgres -d project_name_development latest.dump

echo "removing latest.dump"
rm latest.dump