Django: SQLite overriding POSTGRESQL db on heroku when pushing from local development

Question

So I made a change locally and then pushed to github and heroku, then when I accessed my live heroku project I noticed that the database was oddly reverting to the objects that I had during my local development.

This very well could be because I didn't set up my heroku postgresql db correctly (this is my first time setting up a heroku postgresql with django).

Here is a snippet from my Settings.py, please assume the information in brackets:

ON_HEROKU = os.environ.get('ON_HEROKU')
HEROKU_SERVER = os.environ.get('HEROKU_SERVER')


if ON_HEROKU:

    DATABASES = {
        'default': {
            'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
            'NAME': '<the name is here>',
            'USER': '<user is here>',
            'PASSWORD': '<password is here>',
            'HOST': '<host is here>',                      
            'PORT': '<port is here>',   
        }
    }
else:
    DATABASES = {
        'default': {
            'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
            'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
            'USER': '',
            'PASSWORD': '',
            'HOST': '',                      
            'PORT': '',  
        }
    }

I ran a syncdb, and it seems to do nothing. :

(venv)$ heroku run python manage.py syncdb --account personal
Running `python manage.py syncdb` attached to terminal... up, run.7965
Creating tables ...
Installing custom SQL ...
Installing indexes ...
Installed 0 object(s) from 0 fixture(s)

For the record, the first time I ran syncdb, it seemed to never set up a new user, rather it just tried to install more tables. I don't know why, but this seems like a red flag.

I have also run the following commands to check if the postgres db is there:

(venv)$ heroku addons --account personal | grep POSTGRES
heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev  HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_COBALT

Even though everything seems to be okay, my project is using SQLite db on live. I must be missing something. Any advice appreciated. I can show more if needed.

Daniel Roseman · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-29 07:43:47Z

3

Heroku doesn't provide an ON_HEROKU environment variable. Unless you've set that yourself, this won't work.

However you should not be hard-coding the production database values in your settings anyway. As the Heroku docs explain, those values are provided by environment variables, and the dj-database-url library should be used to convert that into the correct settings automatically. So you can either use the presence or absence of the DATABASE_URL env var to switch between the hard-coded sqlite settings and the dynamic production ones, or even better set a DATABASE_URL in your local dev environment too, pointing to your sqlite file.

answered Sep 29, 2014 at 7:43

Daniel Roseman

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1 Comment

ApathyBear Over a year ago

I have been reading about the method of not hardcoding it, but I think I am getting confused with how to build a DATABASE_URL. Do you think you could link to an example, the heroku docs aren't really enough. As for the 'ON_HEROKU' variable, I have seen this used in other stacks, I didn't know it wouldn't work.

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