Question

Digital ocean app platform enviroment variable not working during building

Posted on September 14, 2022
DigitalOcean App Platform Django
Asked by Taak srls

Hello, I was following the Django deployment tutorial (https://docs.digitalocean.com/tutorials/app-deploy-django-app/) and it says to set the enviroment variables to distinguish between dev and prod enviroment and to save the database settings, I have done that but when I run the building I get this error Exception: DATABASE_URL environment variable not defined

How can I fix that?

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Jon Friesen

DigitalOcean Employee

• September 14, 2022

👋 @taaksrls

The DATABASE_URL bind variables are not available during build time. You have a couple options:

Do your DB operations on app startup
Use a Job
Hardcode your database URL into an environment variable (preferably as a secret) – this is not ideal for dev databases as those are managed by App Platform and can be unavailable during build time.

Hope this helps!

Taak srls • September 14, 2022

In the envs in the app spec the variable is defined as this