Heroku provides a fully managed Postgres Database service as a service. The database scales on demand and provides security in line with industry standards (Heroku Shield Service provides PCI and HIPPA compliance for data in regulated industries like healthcare). Heroku provides different plans for it’s services one of which is it’s Hobby tier which is free. This enables small hobby apps by e.g. students to be hosted for free. In this tier, the postgres provides 1 Gb of storage and 20 connections. More info about it can be found here.

You want to connect a spring boot application to such a database?

Getting started with Heroku

To get started, create a heroku account if you don’t have one. Heroku sign-up. After signing up, login and create a new app from the button near the top-right corner. An app has to be created since a database in heroku is a resource for an app. Give the app a name and choose a region - skip the addition to a pipeline.

You have now created a heroku app successfully.

Setting up Postgres

Select ‘Resources’ on the app ribbon and search for ‘postgres’ at the ‘Add-ons’ search field. Select ‘Heroku Postgres’ and submit the order (on Hobby-Dev plan in our case). After creation, click on the link to the created database and on the opened page, click on ‘Settings’ and then the ‘Credentials’ button.

The credentials include the;

• Host name,
• Database name,
• Username,
• Port,
• Password,
• Direct URI containing all the above details , and
• A heroku CLI access command.

Connecting to a Spring Boot Application

In your application.properties file, replace the following fields with your heroku credentials (changed for security purposes):

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://ec2-54-2-98-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/d13n7krvji
spring.datasource.username=kewiyuhjfdffbymlzf
spring.datasource.password=25b316638e063d5b03aaifld855j64a1a3e68abb71e71f64f56999ba13680d

Acessing the Database from Local Machine

To access the database from another machine, you have to have Heroku CLI installed locally.

Download and install heroku CLI from https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli Make sure to check ‘Add to path` box during installation.

Once installed, on a new shell, check installation success using heroku --version

Run heroku login. You’ll be prompted to login on a browser, login with email address and password used for heroku sign in.

Back on CLI, run the Heroku CLI access command in the credentials page in step two. e.g. heroku pg:psql postgresql-aerodynamic-90339 --app ultra-techy-appone

You can now run SQL commands;

SELECT * FROM tablename;