How To Schedule PostgreSQL Backups With GitHub Actions

Learn how to schedule a GitHub Action that performs a full backup of data and schema from a Neon PostgreSQL database and uploads it to S3.

In this article I’ll take you through how I created a scheduled GitHub Action that connects to my Neon PostgreSQL database, creates a backup using pg_dump, and uploads it to an AWS S3 Bucket every night at midnight (ET).

There are three main components to creating this kind of scheduled backup:

• AWS
  • You’ll need to know your AWS Account ID and have permissions that allow you to create Roles, Identity Providers, S3 Buckets, and be able to update Bucket policies.
• PostgreSQL Database
  • You’ll need to have the connection string for your database, know which region the database is deployed, and which version of PostgreSQL your database uses.
• GitHub Action
  • To write this Action you’ll need to have access to both Actions and Settings > Secrets, along with variables for the GitHub Repository that you’d like to run the Action from.