Question

I am running a Ruby on Rails app on Heroku. It uses a Postgres database. I want to connect to the database from some scripts I am writing and running locally.

Using ENV[‘DATABASE_URL’] I found my connection url to be:

postgres://zugzagcaht:[e-mail]/zugzagcaht

(I modified the characters so this is not the real string!)

Now I am running a Python script that should connect to the database, but am finding a timeout in the connection:

import psycopg2

DB_NAME = 'zugzagcaht'
DB_USER = 'zugzagcaht'
DB_HOST = 'ec2-25-25-209-55.compute-1.amazonaws.com'
DB_PASSWORD = 'h-HebaxOz1_H-5uq_Olv'
TIMEOUT = 5 # seconds

conn = None
try:
  conn = psycopg2.connect("connect_timeout=%i dbname='%s' user='%s' host='%s' password='%s'" % (TIMEOUT, DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_HOST, DB_PASSWORD))
except:
  print "I am unable to connect to the database"

if conn:
  cur = conn.cursor()
  cur.execute("SELECT datname from pg_database")
  rows = cur.fetchall()
  print "Here's the databases:\n"
  for row in rows:
      print "   ", row[0]

Any idea why this isn’t working?

Answer 1

You can’t connect to Heroku shared database instances however they recently launched a new development instance which permits ingress – read more at https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/4/26/heroku_postgres_development_plan/ – I suspect this is the problem.