Question

Digital ocean app platform enviroment variable not working during building

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?

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Jon Friesen
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
• 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

  • key: DATABASE_URL scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME value: ${cashunter-db.DATABASE_URL}

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