How to import a Heroku PG dump into local machine

You see errors because psql tries to interpret SQL queries when you're actually giving him a compressed dump (that's what heroku uses).

While you can't read the dump, pg_restore -O latest.dump gives you valid SQL you could pipe to psql but the easy solution is the following one :

pg_restore -O -d app_development latest.dump

Notes :

Use -O because you probably don't use the random username of your remote heroku postgres db.
Heroku doesn't recommend to use taps but I don't know how really risky it is.

Use the Taps gem. It allows you to run a simple heroku db:pull to populate a local database.

Follow these 4 simple steps in your terminal
(Heroku Dev Center):

Create a backup copy of your database:

$ heroku pg:backups capture DATABASE_NAME

Download the copy from Heroku (to your local machine) using curl:
```
$ curl -o latest.dump `heroku pg:backups public-url`
```
Load it*:
```
$ pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U YOUR_USERNAME -d DATABASE_NAME latest.dump
```
- get YOUR_USERNAME and choose the desired database from your config/database.yml file.
- DATABASE_NAME can be your development/test/production db (Ex. mydb_development)

That's it!