Our company acquired an application from another company, so I'm a little unfamiliar with how they may have done this in the past. Currently there are two applications in Heroku. A production and staging app. Below is the basic app setup for clarity.
Production App
WHITE // Primary database
BLACK // Secondary database linked to Staging App
Staging App
// No databases
Staging application has Config Vars that point to BLACK database URL.
I am trying to run heroku run rake db:migrate on our staging app, but noticed the database is linked to a secondary production BLACK database.
If I run
$ heroku run rake db:migrate -a production
It will update the primary WHITE database in production, but I want to test on the secondary BLACK database first.
If I run
$ heroku run rake db:migrate -a staging
I get the following error
Error: You must install at least one postgresql-client-<version> package.
rake aborted!
Error dumping database
...
Tasks: TOP => db:structure:dump
(See full trace by running task with --trace)
How can I target the secondary BLACK database with a rake command?
Working with Heroku support, I was not able to get this to work with the current configuration. So in the end I decided to create a database for our staging app. Imported the latest dump file from production. And ran heroku run rake db:migrate against staging.
I still got the same error from my original post (see original question). But when I checked the staging database, the schema was updated correctly. Heroku pointed me to the following Stackoverflow discussion, which seems to indicate this may be a Rails 3 bug.
Below solution for clarity:
Production App
WHITE // Primary database
BLACK // Deleted
Staging App
Gray // Primary database