What does adding POSTGRES env variables achieve? Django + Postgres DB

Posted March 31, 2022
Django PostgreSQL

As I have a Django App (using the app platform) with a connected DB, the connection to the DB seems to work out of the box. However, some tutorials online suggest I add the following env variables to my app:

POSTGRES_DB = ${db.DATABASE}
POSTGRES_HOST = ${db.HOSTNAME}
POSTGRES_USER = ${db.USERNAME}
POSTGRES_PASSWORD = ${db.PASSWORD}
POSTGRES_PORT = ${db.PORT}

And also some associated code in my settings.py file.

I wonder - what will this achieve? :-)

Best regards Frederik

frfa

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Bobby Iliev • April 6, 2022

Hello,

The main reason for using environment variables is so that you don’t have to hardcode your database details in your configuration file.

That way you could just have the environment variable names specified in your config file, so when you commit your code to GitHub for example, no one will be able to get to your database credentials.

This is considered a good practice, rather than specifying the credentials directly in your config.

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby

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