Question

A buddy and I are developing a Django app and are using git.

As we work, we make fake accounts on our site, login, and upload content to the database, etc..for testing purposes. Every time we merge branches, we get merge conflicts in our database file. The database file is in the repository, and, since we’re testing separately, the local copies of the file develop differently.

How do I prevent the database file from being tracked, so we can each keep our local copies?

With the following, we’ve been able to avoid using a local path:

## settings.py


from os.path import dirname, join

PROJECT_DIR = dirname(__file__)

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': join(PROJECT_DIR, 'foo.db'),
        'USER': '',
        'PASSWORD': '',
        'HOST': '',
        'PORT': '',
    }
}

What would be ideal, is something like:

## settings.py


from os.path import dirname, join

PROJECT_DIR = dirname(__file__)

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': join('../../../', PROJECT_DIR, 'foo.db'), # this path is outside the repository (ie, 'Users/sgarza62/foo.db')
        'USER': '',
        'PASSWORD': '',
        'HOST': '',
        'PORT': '',
    }
}

---

How can we keep our database files from being committed?

Answer 1

Add your database file to .gitignore. Then you can keep it in its current location, but it will not be under version control.