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I'm currently building a small Django app, and I wanted to deploy it to Heroku. To do this, Heroku asks you to implement some specific database settings at the bottom of your settings.py file:
import dj_database_url DATABASES['default'] = dj_database_url.config()
The problem with this was that although these settings worked when the project was deployed to Heroku, they broke my local build with the following error:
raise ImproperlyConfigured("settings.DATABASES is improperly configured. " django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: settings.DATABASES is improperly configured. Please supply the ENGINE value. Check settings documentation for more details.
The reason I was getting this on my local build is that dj_database expects an environment variable, "DATABASE_URL", to be present on the local system, like it is when running on Heroku.
The simple solution I came up with was to add a an IF statement in to settings.py to detect whether or not the environment variable was present:
env = os.environ.copy() db_url = env.get('DATABASE_URL', False) if db_url != False: import dj_database_url DATABASES['default'] = dj_database_url.config()
You can't just say 'if env['DATABASE_URL']' as this raises a KeyError. So instead I've used the 'get' method to either assign the value of the environment variable if it exists, or the default, 'False', if it doesn't. And voilà! My app now runs on both my local machine and Heroku.