Django error in Heroku: “Please supply the ENGINE value”

Question

I read and apply \"Getting started with Django on Heroku\" tutorial but ran into problem while syncing db:

raise ImproperlyConfigured(\"settings.DATABASES is         


        

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue, but apparently for different reasons. In the Heroku docs at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django#prerequisites, it says to add the following to settings.py:

DATABASES['default'] =  dj_database_url.config()

You can pass in a parameter of:

DATABASES['default'] =  dj_database_url.config(default='postgres://user:pass@localhost/dbname')

And that will allow you to develop locally and on Heroku. The part that actually SOLVES the problem I had though was that the Heroku config environment variable of DATABASE_URL was not actually set. To set this, I ran

$ heroku config

I saw the Database URL assigned to a separate config variable. So I created a new variable:

$ heroko config:add DATABASE_URL={#the database url}

That solved my problem. I hope it helps anyone else with similar issues.