Howto use Amazon RDS from Heroku

Heroku is quite popular for lightweight webservice and like projects. Until recently Heroku only offered PostgreSQL-based database backend providers, but now Heroku offers a quite large range of database backend providers; among them Amazon RDS.

This is a short run-down on how I managed to get a Heroku-based application to connect to a Amazon RDS-based database.

• Install the Amazon RDS command line tools

  $ sudo apt-get install rdscli
  

• Create a AWS Credential File (~/.aws/AwsCredentials.properties)

{% gist 4690345 %}

• Create a RDS db in the us-east region (if not run in this region, Heroku isn’t able to connect to it)

   $ rds-create-db-instance --db-instance-identifier [name]\
     --allocated-storage 5 \
     --db-instance-class db.m1.small  \
     --engine MySQL5.1 \
     --master-username [user] \
     --master-user-password [pass] \
     --db-name [db-name] \
     --region us-east
     --headers \
     --aws-credential-file ~/.aws/AwsCredentials.properties
  

• Now authorize access from your public ip to the Amazon RDS instance

   $ rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default --cidr-ip 87.1.1.1/32 \
   --aws-credential-file ~/.aws/AwsCredentials.properties
  

• Test MySQL connectivy from your local machine to the Amazon RDS instance

   $ mysql -u root -p -h <your-amazon-rds-hostname>
  

• Now authorize access from the Heroku ip group ranges to the Amazon RDS instance

   $ rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress --db-security-group-name default \
   --ec2-security-group-name default --ec2-security-group-owner-id 098166147350 \
   --aws-credential-file ~/.aws/AwsCredentials.properties
  

• Enabled the Amazon RDS plugin using the Heroku console toolbelt

  $ heroku addons:add amazon_rds url=mysql://<user>:<pass>@<your-amazon-rds-hostname>/<db-name>