Back up Fly Postgres with GitHub Actions

Fly Postgres stores its data on volumes, and the fine folks at Fly.io set up automatic snapshots for us. However, I sleep better at night knowing that my databases are backed up with pg_dump.

I found surprisingly few results when I searched for a quick solution to this problem. One of the solutions was a python script, which seemed overkill for such a simple task, but it was a useful starting point. In the end, I came up with a relatively short backup.yml that does the job:

The task will run every day at 4AM. workflow_dispatch is there so that the task can be run manually as well.

Don't forget to set the correct region, update PGUSERand PGDATABASE, as well as replace your-fly-db-app-name, your-s3-bucket, and your-path.

You will also need to visit your repository settings and set the following secrets:

• FLY_API_TOKEN — A Fly personal access token (generate one here)
• PGPASSWORD — the password for the database being backed up

And finally, don't forget: a backup is not a backup if you've never tried restoring it!