Mg Railway DB Restore

Railway DB Restore

Restore a local PostgreSQL backup file to a Railway environment.

Inputs

Ask the user if not provided:

• project — Railway project name
• environment — Railway destination environment name (e.g., demo-upgrade, staging)
• backup file — Path to the .dump.gz file (check .claude/local/ for available backups)

Procedure

1. List available backups (if user didn't specify a file):

   ls -lh <project-root>/.claude/local/*.dump.gz
   

2. Link to the correct project and environment using Railway MCP link-environment tool:

   • workspacePath:
   • environmentName:

3. Restore the backup — credentials piped from Railway CLI (never write credential values in commands):

   VARS=$(railway variables -s Postgres -e <environment> --kv 2>/dev/null) && \
   export PGPASSWORD=$(echo "$VARS" | grep '^PGPASSWORD=' | cut -d= -f2-) && \
   PGUSER=$(echo "$VARS" | grep '^PGUSER=' | cut -d= -f2-) && \
   PGDATABASE=$(echo "$VARS" | grep '^PGDATABASE=' | cut -d= -f2-) && \
   DB_URL=$(echo "$VARS" | grep '^DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL=' | cut -d= -f2-) && \
   PGHOST=$(echo "$DB_URL" | sed 's|postgresql://[^@]*@||;s|:.*||') && \
   PGPORT=$(echo "$DB_URL" | sed 's|.*:||;s|/.*||') && \
   gunzip -c <backup-file-path> | pg_restore --clean --if-exists --no-owner --no-acl \
     -h "$PGHOST" -p "$PGPORT" -U "$PGUSER" -d "$PGDATABASE"
   

   This reads credentials from railway variables into shell vars at runtime — no secrets ever appear in the command text.

4. Report success or any errors to the user.

Notes

• Railway runs PostgreSQL 17 — if local pg_restore version is too old, use the one from postgresql@17 homebrew package
• --clean --if-exists drops existing objects before recreating (safe for existing databases)
• --no-owner --no-acl ensures compatibility across environments
• This does NOT run Drizzle migrations — run migrations separately if schema changes are needed

Source: modelguide/modelguide — distributed by TomeVault.