How To Use PostgreSQL with your Django Application on Ubuntu

This article describes how to configure PostgreSQL with the Django application on your Ubuntu machine. First, let’s look at an overview of all the tools we use. 

• PostgreSQL is a high-performance, reliable, and robust open-source relational database management system (RDBMS).
• Django is a robust, free, open-source, Python-based web framework that follows the MVT (Model-Template-View) architectural pattern. It uses an SQLite database by default and It is configured to work with Django by default, but this SQLite database is not suitable for complex projects. Other databases such as Postgres can be used here as they are more robust and preferred. Now let’s configure Postgres to work with our Django application,

Installing required packages

Installing Postgres on our machine is the first step in configuring it with Django. The command below will install PostgreSQL on the Ubuntu machine.

sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Configure PostgreSQL

To interact with Postgres we need to use its interactive shell prompt which we can activate as follow.

sudo -u postgres psql

Creating a Database and User

You’ll see that the question has changed; this means that we can now configure Postgres by creating a database and a user for it, along with a user and it is granted all required privileges on the created database.

# create a database named demo
CREATE DATABASE demo;

# created a user demouser with password 123456789
CREATE USER demouser WITH PASSWORD '12345678'; 

# configured client encoding to utf8
ALTER ROLE demouser SET client_encoding TO 'utf8'; 

ALTER ROLE demouser SET default_transaction_isolation TO 'read committed';
ALTER ROLE demouser SET timezone TO 'UTC';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE demo TO demouser; # granted required access to demouser over demo db

Exit from shell

As you can see above a database is created successfully along with a user and it is granted all required privileges on the crested database. Now we are done with the Postgres setup let’s exit it.

\q

Setup a Virtual Environment

Let’s configure the virtual environment for development, this step can be skipped but it is always recommended to use a development environment for each project, this can be achieved using a Python virtual environment.

mkdir gfg

# Move to gfg folder
cd gfg

Here we created a dedicated folder for the project, you can name it anything you want and cd (change directory) to go into your newly created directory then run the following command that will create a virtual environment for your project.

python -m venv venv
ls

Now let’s activate the virtual environment and start using it.

# source venv/bin/activate

Installing and Creating a Django Project

Now that the development environment is configured we can start a Django project. First, we need Django to install it as follows:

python -m pip install Django

Creating Project

Let’s create a Django project by running the following commands:

django-admin startproject demo_project

The above command just created the Django default starter project, now we need to do a few tweaks in the settings.py file to allow the client access to the Django instance and also connect it with Postgres.

Configuring the Django with Postgres Database

In Django apps, the starter project is configured by default to use an SQLite database. You’ll need to install a package using pip and modify the setting.py file to connect to Postgres, this is act as a connector. First, install a pip package called “psycopg2-binary”, It is a PostgreSQL database driver, it is used to perform operations on PostgreSQL using python.

pip install psycopg2-binary

Now let us make the required changes to the setting file,

nano settings.py

As the film opens, find the database section as shown:

By default, it is configured to use SQLite database as you can see. To connect it to Postgres Database make a change as follow:

Migrate all Files to the Database

Let’s migrate changes to the database using the following commands.

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

Output:

Testing PostgreSQL Connection with Django

Your Django app is now connected to your Postgres database. For confirmation, let’s can check the Django Admin panel and PostgreSQL Database:

To test the database let’s create a Django superuser and check if it’s working or not using the following command:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Now as the superuser is created let’s use it in the Django admin panel for that visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin in a browser and you will be prompted to the Login, Fill in the superuser credentials.

Now, you can see all the created users in the panel:

Over here you can see all the tables created by Django in PostgreSQL.