Django Heroku Setup notes

django_heroku_setup.md

Django Heroku setup notes

How to do normal Django manage commands?

I.e. create superuser, check migrations, run migrations...

Also, don't make migrations on the Heroku machine. Make them locally and commit to version control.

heroku run python manage.py showmigrations --app myapp
heroku run python manage.py migrate --app myapp
heroku run python manage.py createsuperuser --app myapp

Note that running heroku ps:exec per this page won't work because none of your environment variables will be set.

migrate runs migrations, but then migrations are empty?

Or you get the sqlite3.OperationalError: no such table: auth_user issue when trying to createsuperuser?

Couple of points:

• Heroku doesn't use sqlite3, so make sure you .gitignore your db.sqlite3 file and use the postgresql add-on.
• The DATABASE_URL environment variable needs to be configured - the deploy won't work out of the box. Use https://pypi.org/project/django-heroku/ or https://pypi.org/project/dj-database-url/.

Migrations not automatically running with each deployment?

Ensure the migrate command is at the top of the Procfile at directory root:

release: python manage.py migrate
web: gunicorn myapp.wsgi --log-file -

Other weird quibbles

IntegerField for sqlite3 accepts larger values than Postgresql. If storing large integers, consider BigIntegerField or CharField. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11302711/integer-out-of-range