Question

I have developed a first web application using a local PostgreSQL 9.1 on OSX (Lion 10.7.4) using Play! Framework 2.0.3. I started with my database connection defined in conf/application.conf (relative to application’s directory) with

db.default.driver=org.postgresql.Driver
db.default.url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/fotoplay"
db.default.user=foo
db.default.password=bar

(username and password have been changed before posting) This works for writing and testing. I now want to deploy to Heroku. I have set up the Procfile (in application’s directory) with a single line:

web: target/start -Dhttp.port=${PORT} ${JAVA_OPTS}  
-DapplyEvolutions.default=false 
-Ddb.default.driver=org.postgresql.Driver 
-Ddb.default.url=$DATABASE_URL

I have exported DATABASE_URL in .bash_profile so that I can echo $DATABASE_URL at the system command line and get

postgres://foo:bar@localhost/photoplay

At Heroku, I have set up an instance of postgresql. I’m not sure on how to write a database evolution to populate heroku, so I turned that off evolutions and populated my database manually. My current evolutions build tables and populate them with some initial data from some csv files, so I would need to place the csv files somewhere accessible to heroku. At least for a first pass, I don’t want to tackle this issue just yet. But as a result of the manual steps, I have a populated database on Heroku.

With this configuration, my application runs correctly locally. However, I am not using DATABASE_URL, which seems wrong. I pushed this to HEROKU and is is not able to connect to the database. The error is:

Caused by: org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: 
FATAL: password authentication failed for user "foo"

If I remove the username & password, I break my local configuration. I should be able to use DATABASE_URL ‘instead of’ the older syntax, but I don’t quite know how to do that. I don’t think that I can figure this out experimentally (wandering high dimensional spaces is hopeless, and there are several possible configuration settings that might be involved & are subject to typos). Any guidance on how I should set up application.conf would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Worth a try: in your application.conf file, change your db.default.url parameter in order to include the username & password in the URL, and remove the db.default.user and db.default.password parameters:

db.default.url="postgres://foo:bar@localhost/fotoplay"