Question

I’m attempting to launch a GeoDjango app. I’ve installed Postgres & PostGIS using brew on Lion. I created a database using template_postgis: createdb -T template_postgis test.

When I run python manage.py syncdb, I get the following error:

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Cannot determine
PostGIS version for database “test”. GeoDjango requires at least
PostGIS version 1.3. Was the database created from a spatial database
template?

How can I track down the source of the error? I’ve checked that the user & pass in the config have access to the database etc.

Answer 1

As a first debugging step: try to check the postgis template version manually, e.g. on the command-line connect to your database with psql test, and query with select postgis_lib_version();. This function should be defined in template_postgis and return some number. Example output:

$ psql test
psql (9.0.4)
Type "help" for help.

test=# select postgis_lib_version();

 postgis_lib_version
---------------------
 1.5.2
(1 row)

If an error occurs, you know the error is in the database.