Restoring an Elastic Beanstalk Database

Due to the inflexibility of an EB managed RDS database, restoring an application DB from a snapshot can be difficult. The high level process is to allow EB to create (and manage) a new DB, restore the snapshot independently, dump the snapshot locally and restore the dump into the EB managed DB.

In practice, the steps to do this are as follows:

• Create VPC security group that gives your IP access to AWS
• Restore old snapshot
• Add VPC security group to snapshot
• Ensure both DBs are publicly accessible (change in RDS config)
• Dump snapshot DB:

pg_dump -h restored_snapshot_db_identifier.ccjgurhe4rmi.eu-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com -U master -f db_dump.sql ebdb

• Ensure new EB DB is up and running
• Add VPC security group to EB DB
• Upload dumped snapshot DB into new EB DB:

cat db_dump.sql | psql -h eb_db_identifier.ccjgurhe4rmi.eu-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com -U master -d ebdb

• Delete snapshot
• Remove VPC security group from EB DB