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How to Connect your Django App to a dockerized PostgreSQL and pgAdmin

Micheal Ojemoron on March 22, 2020

Docker has been my default environment set-up for deploying most of my web projects quickly. It is lightweight and it has also helped me solve pack...

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Laurel German • Nov 19 '21

A few notes that may be helpful to other beginners like me:

The docker-compose file should be saved as docker-compose.yaml
The docker-compose file didn't work as listed, but I changed line 11 to "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=demo" and that worked
Change the username/password on lines 27-28 of the docker-compose file to your own email address and a NON-PRIVATE password like "demo" or "password" since you're saving it in plain-text
The username and password on lines 27-28 are what you use to log in to pgadmin. The username and password on lines 10-11 are what you enter in the "Connection" tab when you're creating your database.
You have to pip install django_postgres_extensions in your django app environment before running runserver, or it won't work

Philip Mutua • May 26 '21 • Edited

Hi Micheal thanks. I have a question I have seen some other examples where one does the following:

volumes:
      - ./data/db:/var/lib/postgresql/data

Based on your example above in the docker-compose.yml file under the db service what is the difference?

Wale Opakunle • Jul 18 '22

Micheal, I am not sure exactly how to thank you for this article.
Over the last 24 hours, I have been following articles that use the postgres docker container name as the host while connecting to pgadmin and been unable to connect. 24 hours, and I have been pulling my hair out wondering what the hell I was doing wrong.
Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I can sleep now.

Hemaz • Nov 30 '22

Great informations, thanks a lot. I have a question: how can I connect other docker files to Django like what you did with Postgres? I mean how can I connect and consume other model like YoloV5 docker image inside docker?

Lewis kori • Mar 28 '20

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you for sharing

Micheal Ojemoron • Mar 28 '20 • Edited

Thanks, I am glad it helped

itamar27 • Aug 15 '21

Hello, i've been following your instruction but unfortunately I am having some issues which are not mentioned here.

File "C:\Users\Yonatan.virtualenvs\LMS-NZATbBlN\lib\site-packages\django_postgres_extensions\models\expressions.py", line 2, in
from django.utils import six
ImportError: cannot import name 'six' from 'django.utils' (C:\Users\Yonatan.virtualenvs\LMS-NZATbBlN\lib\site-packages\django\utils_init_.py)

This is the error i'm having about some module named "six".

Do you know how to solve this problem?
Haven't found any good answer online

Guillermo • May 17 '20

Thanks Michael, you saved me a lot of time!

Micheal Ojemoron • May 17 '20

You are welcome Guillermo

Philip Mutua • May 10 '21

Hi Micheal, how does one connect to a local MYSQL client using docker compose? If we dont' want to use mysql container?

perymerdeka • Feb 11 '21

how to migrate?

Ricardo Martinez • Feb 11 '21

sudo docker exec -it python manage.py migrate
but the django HOST variable in the container must be set to
HOST=db

and if you've bind-mounted your code into the container, you can do it directly from the console in your IDE (e.g. vscode) since the container is sharing the exact same code. BUT here HOST=localhost. This means you have to have separate environment variables set. Confusing, but that's what I've noticed.