How to use Flask/Peewee with Heroku?

Question

I am attempting to deploy a Flask app to Heroku. I'm using Peewee as an ORM for a Postgres database. When I follow the standard Heroku steps to deploying Flask, the web process crashes after I enter heroku ps:scale web=1. Here's what the logs say:

Starting process with command `python app.py`
/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py:2434: UserWarning: Table for <class 'flask_peewee.auth.User'> ("user") is reserved, please override using Meta.db_table
cls, _meta.db_table,
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "app.py", line 167, in <module>
auth.User.create_table(fail_silently=True)
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py", line 2518, in create_table if fail_silently and cls.table_exists():
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py", line 2514, in table_exists return cls._meta.db_table in cls._meta.database.get_tables()
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py", line 507, in get_tables ORDER BY c.relname""")
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py", line 313, in execute cursor = self.get_cursor()
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py", line 310, in get_cursor return self.get_conn().cursor()
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py", line 306, in get_conn self.connect()
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py", line 296, in connect self.__local.conn = self.adapter.connect(self.
database, **self.connect_kwargs)
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/peewee.py", line 199, in connect return psycopg2.connect(database=database, **kwargs)
File "/app/.heroku/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/psycopg2/__init__.py", line 179, in connect connection_factory=connection_factory, async=async)
psycopg2.OperationalError: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting connections on Unix domain socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
Process exited with status 1
State changed from starting to crashed

I've tried a bunch of different things to get Heroku to allow my app to talk to a Postgres db, but haven't had any luck. Is there an easy way to do this? What do I need to do to configure Flask/Peewee so that I can use a db on Heroku?

Answer 1

According to the Peewee docs, you don't want to use Proxy() unless your local database driver is different than your remote one (i.e. locally, you're using SQLite and remotely you're using Postgres). If, however, you are using Postgres both locally and remotely it's a much simpler change. In this case, you'll want to only change the connection values (database name, username, password, host, port, etc.) at runtime and do not need to use Proxy().

Peewee has a built-in URL parser for database connections. Here's how to use it:

import os
from peewee import *
from playhouse.db_url import connect

db = connect(os.environ.get('DATABASE_URL'))

class BaseModel(Model):
    class Meta:
        database = db

In this example, peewee's db_url module reads the environment variable DATABASE_URL and parses it to extract the relevant connection variables. It then creates a PostgresqlDatabase object with those values.

Locally, you'll want to set DATABASE_URL as an environment variable. You can do this according to the instructions of whatever shell you're using. Or, if you want to use the Heroku toolchain (launch your local server using heroku local) you can add it to a file called .env at the top level of your project. For the remote setup, you'll want to add your database URL as a remote Heroku environment variable. You can do this with the following command:

heroku config:set DATABASE_URL=postgresql://myurl

You can find that URL by going into Heroku, navigating to your database, and clicking on "database credentials". It's listed under URI.