Postgres

Postgres is just an amazing database, and it has a lot of features, such as fulltext search, which is well integrated with Django. There are also amazing django packages that are built around Postgres features such as “LISTEN/NOTIFY”, that allow you to dispatch events from the database to the application, and can replace the need for a message broker like RabbitMQ or Redis. 1 Platforms like Supabase and Crunchy Data are built around Postgres and provide a lot of additional features and services, and almost every PaaS provider has a Postgres offering.

Having said that, it is also a good idea to use SQLite for regular projects, because it is easy to sync its content and backup (to aws, etc.), so you might want to look into my SQLite in production article on that.

Getting started with Postgres in Django

The easiest way to get started with Postgres is to spin up a local database with Docker:

docker run -d -p 5432:5432 \
  -v $HOME/data:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
  --name postgres_container \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password \
  postgres

This command pulls the latest docker image of postgres and runs it in a container.

  • --name postgres_container sets the name of the container to postgres_container to make it easier to reference it later.
  • -v $HOME/data:/var/lib/postgresql/data mounts the directory $HOME/data inside the container, so data can be persisted during container recreations.
  • -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password flag is used to set the password of the postgres root user to “password”. The name of the root user is “postgres”, but can also be changed with the environment variable POSTGRES_USER.

Create a database

Postgres, like other databases, comes with psql, a command line tool to interact with the database. You can use it to create a database like this:

docker exec -it postgres_container psql -U postgres

This command opens a psql shell inside the container and connects to the database with the user postgres. Then you can create a database like this:

CREATE DATABASE project_alpha;

There is also a command line tool called createdb that does the same thing:

docker exec -it postgres_container createdb -U postgres project_alpha

Connect to your database in your django app

In order to connect to your database in django, you need to install the psycopg2 package, which is a PostgreSQL adapter for Python. In your django app you can then specify your database settings like this:

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.postgresql",
        "NAME": "project_alpha",
        "USER": "postgres",
        "PASSWORD": "password",
        "HOST": "localhost",
        "PORT": "5432",
    }
}

Or you can use the dj-database-url package to configure your DATABASES setting with the DATABASE_URL environment variable like this:

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://postgres:password@localhost:5432/project_alpha"

This is a very common pattern for configuring databases in 12 factor apps, and it is also used by Heroku, Fly.io, and other platforms.

Wrap up with Docker compose

Here is a configuration example for docker compose, if you wish to integrate it in your development environment:

version: '3.8'
services:
  db:
    container_name: postgres_container
    image: postgres
    restart: always
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
      POSTGRES_DB: project_alpha
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"

  1. Here is an example of a package that uses this feature, and can replace the need of a package like Celery: PaulGilmartin/django-pgpubsub: A distributed task processing framework for Django built on top of the Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN protocol. ↩

LinkedIn Reddit