Running GeoDjango on Heroku (August 2017)

Heroku Setup

There are currently two ways to get the GDAL, GEOS, and PROJ libraries needed by GeoDjango onto your Heroku slug

1. Via a custom buildpack (https://github.com/cyberdelia/heroku-geo-buildpack) 1. Via setting the environment variable BUILD_WITH_GEO_LIBRARIES=1 while using the default Python buildpack

This has two issues as of 8–16–2017: The current “stack” on Heroku is heroku-16. This stack does not properly copy over libjasper, which is a required linked library by libgdal. One solution is to set your stack to cedar-14 instead. Another solution is to use a slightly modified custom buildpack (https://github.com/dschep/heroku-geo-buildpack) or a slightly modified offical buildpack ([https://github.com/TrailblazingTech/heroku-buildpack-python#fix-gdal-jasper] (https://github.com/TrailblazingTech/heroku-buildpack-python#fix-gdal-jasper)).

If you stick with the heroku-16 stack, you’ll want to add the following to your settings.py:

GDAL_LIBRARY_PATH = os.getenv(‘GDAL_LIBRARY_PATH’)
GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH = > os.getenv(‘GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH’)

Then, if using the official Python buildpack, you will want to set your environment variables like so:

GDAL_LIBRARY_PATH=/app/.heroku/vendor/lib/libgdal.so
> GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH=/app/.heroku/vendor/lib/libgeos_c.so

This may be required as well on cedar-14 — I didn’t take notes during that part of the struggle :-)

Django Settings Changes

1. Add ‘django.contrib.gis’ to your INSTALLED_APPS 1. Change your DATABASES dict to use postgis, like so:

DATABASES[‘default’] = dj_database_url.config(conn_max_age=600,
> default=’postgis://localhost:5432/{}’.format(APP_NAME))
# VERY IMPORTANT BECAUSE HEROKU WILL USE ‘postgres’ AS THE SCHEME
DATABASES[‘default’][‘ENGINE’] = ‘django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis’

Other Django Things

In urls.py, change from django.contrib import admin to from django.contrib.gis import admin for admin urls

1. In whatever app makes sense, add the following migration:

from django.contrib.postgres.operations import CreateExtension
from > django.db import migrations

class Migration(migrations.Migration):
operations = [
> CreateExtension(‘postgis’)
]

Credits

cyberdelia and dschep on GitHub for helping provide and work through the gdal dependency issues with a custom buildpack.

GitHub Example

https://github.com/TrailblazingTech/django-gis-heroku

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