Question

I’m trying to configure local dev environment with Heroku, Django and virtualenv. Everything seems to be working when pushed to Heroku hosting, but locally, I cannot seem to connect to the Heroku-supplied dev Postgre DB.

According to the instructions, I added the following to settings.py:

import dj_database_url
DATABASES['default'] =  dj_database_url.config()

But this doesn’t seem to get invoked while running locally. Get the following exception:

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: settings.DATABASES is improperly configured. Please supply the ENGINE value. Check settings documentation for more details.

Is it even possible to connect to the Heroku hosted dev Postgre from a local instance of Django? If it is, what am I missing?

Thank you!

Answer 1

This turned out to be relatively straightforward…

dj_database_url.cofig() takes a parameter default. Database info on heroku can be found here:
https://postgres.heroku.com/databases/

If your db info and credentials are as follows:
Host somehost.amazonaws.com
Database somedb
User foo
Port 5432
Password bar

Then the settings.py entry should look like this:

import dj_database_url
DATABASES['default'] =  dj_database_url.config(default='postgres://foo:[e-mail]:5432/somedb')

Same steps work if you are using a local Postgre setup as well.