Postgis isn't an available database backend

Question

I'm facing this error when setting up geodjango in a working django 1.9 app.

My app is living inside a amazon EC2 instance plus a RDS postgres instance.

The error is:

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: 'django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis' isn't an available database backend.
Try using 'django.db.backends.XXX', where XXX is one of:
    'mysql', 'oracle', 'postgresql', 'sqlite3

What I've done:

• Install GEOS, PROJ.4 and PostGIS as described in geodjango doc.
• Install PostGIS in amazon RDS as described in amazon doc.

• Modify my project settings.py to include:

  • INSTALLED_APPS = (... 'django.contrib.admin', ... 'django.contrib.gis')
  • GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH = '/usr/local/lib/libgeos_c.so'
  • DATABASES = { ... 'ENGINE': 'django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis' ...}

• Modify my app models.py to import models from django.contrib.gis.db, instead of django.db

Any guess what I'm missing?

Answer 1

I had the same issue i installed the osgeo and then navigated to the missing libraries

> # Build paths inside the project like this: os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ...) BASE_DIR =
> os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))
> TEMPLATE_DIR=os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'templates')

and these were the missing libraries for me:

 GDAL_LIBRARY_PATH = r'C:\OSGeo4W64\bin\gdal204.dll'
 GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH=r'C:\OSGeo4W64\bin\geos_c.dll'

Answer 2

I had the same issue. I ran pip install gdal, which showed error messages about a libffi library missing on my system. After installing the correct library (libffi6 on AUR), I ran pip install gdal again and the issue was resolved.

Answer 3

Run this command

sudo apt-get install binutils libproj-dev gdal-bin

This is described in this documentation