This add-on is operated by Crunchy Data Inc.

Crunchy Bridge is a fully managed Postgres service from the Postgres Experts.

Last updated December 22, 2021

Crunchy Bridge is an add-on for fully managed Postgres provided by Crunchy Data.

Crunchy Bridge provides fully managed Postgres that you can easily connect to your Heroku app. Crunchy Bridge includes:

• Simple provisioning
• Backups
• Disaster recovery and point in time recovery
• Simple scaling
• Built-in connection pooling

These features are provided by an expert team of Postgres contributors.

You can connect your app to Crunchy Bridge with any of your standard language drivers in:

• Ruby
• Python
• Node.js
• Go
• Java
• PHP

Provisioning the Add-on

Attach crunchy-postgres to a Heroku application via the CLI:

$ heroku addons:create crunchy-postgres
Creating CRUNCHY on freely-falling-7394... free
Your add-on has been provisioned successfully

After provisioning crunchy-postgres, the CRUNCHY_DATABASE_URL config var is available in the attached app’s configuration. It contains the full connection string to your newly provisioned Postgres database. You can see the config var via the heroku config:get command:

$ heroku config:get CRUNCHY_DATABASE_URL
postgres://postgres:sDcaz24izdKgsLv328cKabclqb2v7lcdT3zCQd47hhKTWlehu13ICKmhRMJwP2XN@p.ldzx3sqmwdzsbimyfmlrdpoxpq.db.postgresbridge.com:5432/postgres

After installing CRUNCHY-POSTGRES, the application can be integrated with the add-on.

Local Setup

Service Setup

You can install Postgres for use in a local development environment. Typically, this process entails installing Postgres on your local machine and pointing the app to your local DB.

Language-Specific Integrations

Ruby on Rails

To use PostgreSQL as your database in Ruby applications, include the pg gem in your Gemfile.

gem 'pg'

Run bundle install to download and resolve all dependencies.

If you’re using the pg gem to connect to your Postgres database from a Heroku dyno, and haven’t specified an sslmode in your configuration or code, the gem defaults to sslmode: prefer. In this mode, your connections work if SSL use is enforced on your Postgres database.

Python/Django

Install the dj-database-url package using pip.

pip install dj-database-url

Then add the following to the bottom of settings.py:

import dj_database_url
DATABASES['default'] = dj_database_url.config(conn_max_age=600, ssl_require=True)

This parses and converts the values of the DATABASE_URL environment variable to something Django can understand.

Migrating Between Plans

Use the heroku addons:upgrade command to migrate to a new plan.

$ heroku addons:upgrade CRUNCHY-POSTGRES:hobby-4
-----> Upgrading CRUNCHY-POSTGRES:hobby-4 to sharp-mountain-4005... done, v18 ($100/mo)
       Your plan has been updated to: CRUNCHY-POSTGRES:hobby-4

Removing the Add-on

Before removing CRUNCHY-POSTGRES, export its data by running pg_dump against your database.

To remove CRUNCHY-POSTGRES, use the CLI:

$ heroku addons:destroy CRUNCHY-POSTGRES
-----> Removing CRUNCHY-POSTGRES from sharp-mountain-4005... done, v20 (free)

Support

Submit all CRUNCHY-POSTGRES support and runtime issues via one of the Heroku Support channels. Any non-support-related issues or product feedback is welcome at info@crunchydata.com.