I recently moved from Heroku's built in postgres database to Amazon RDS to take advantage of Read Replica.

The following steps will get you there, too.

1. Signup for Amazon RDS
2. Download the Amazon RDS Command Line Toolkit
3. Install the Toolkit
• Unpack toolkit. I did this in /Users/phertler/Applications/RDSCli-1.3.003
• export AWS_RDS_HOME=/Users/phertler/Applications/RDSCli-1.3.003
• Make sure you JAVA_HOME is set. export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
4. Configure credentials
• cp $AWS_RDS_HOME/credential-file-path.template $AWS_RDS_HOME/credential-file.txt
• Update credential-file.txt with your Amazon Account credentials
5. Create a security group for your database
• rds-create-db-security-group --db-security-group-name mygroupname  --db-security-group-description 'my database security group'
6. Launch a RDS instance with an instance named myinstance database named mytestdb. Be sure to remember your username and password. 
7. Allow current local machine to connect to your new mysql database
• rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress --db-security-group-name mygroupname -i /32
8. List your instances to be sure you can connect
• rds-describe-db-instances
9. Now you can connect to your database from you local machine. You will need to find your RDS instance's endpoint from the AWS console. It will look something like myinstance.clxktpjkersojt.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com
• mysql -h myinstance.clxktpjkersojt.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u yourusername -p

Labels: ec2 rds heroku