til/postgres/open-heroku-database-in-postico-from-terminal.md

Open Heroku Database In Postico From Terminal

I recently downloaded Postico at the recommendation of Dillon Hafer. I tend to use psql as a PostgreSQL client for all my database querying needs. However, Dillon highly recommended Postico for doing system admin querying.

I needed to connect directly to a production Postgres server on Heroku to investigate slow queries. Postico presented me with a form of individual fields for host, port, username, password, database, etc.

This would have been a little annoying to fill in manually. Dillon had a shortcut to recommend. From the command line you can open Postico with a connection string. It knows how to split that connection string into the respective fields.

heroku config:get DATABASE_URL --app APP_NAME | xargs open -a Postico

This requests the DATABASE_URL from Heroku. It is a Postgres connection string with all the fields needed to connect to a remove server. This is then passed via xargs to Postico as it is being opened.