Since goose uses pq under the hood, to hit remote urls
goose postgres "user=postgres password=${PROD_PGPASS} dbname=test sslmode=disable host=database.rds.amazonaws.com" status
I didnt have a default database created, so I needed to psql into it - summoning psql via docker container
docker run -it --rm jbergknoff/postgresql-client postgresql://postgres:${PROD_PGPASS}@database.rds.amazonaws.com:5432
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updated: 2 October 2021.