Datasource not being recognized when running heroku local

[ellenchristine]

From what I understand from the Heroku documentation, I should be able to access the database locally with no configuration updates to this project as long as I export the datasource (explained here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#local-setup), which I did.

However, I'm getting this error when trying to access localhost:5000/db.html in this project:

dataSource or dataSourceClassName or jdbcUrl is required

Is there additional configuration required to get this to work locally? It works fine once it's deployed to Heroku remotely.

[mmautner]

After a little digging I've discovered that you should set a JDBC_DATABASE_URL environment variable which should look like this:

jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/my_database_name

Source

Why JDBC_DATABASE_URL and not DATABASE_URL like all other typical Heroku apps? I'm not sure why that was chosen, but that's the environment variable name read from the Spring configuration file here:

https://github.com/heroku/java-getting-started/blob/master/src/main/resources/application.properties#L1

Setting that environment variable got things working for me:

[Malax]

I realize this is an old issue, but I want to shed some light on it before closing:

Why JDBC_DATABASE_URL and not DATABASE_URL like all other typical Heroku apps?

JDBC requires a different URL schema. The Java buildpack will create JDBC_DATABASE_URL for you on Heroku based on DATABASE_URL. We do not override DATABASE_URL since the different schema could break other tools, addons, or apps.

In any case, what @mmautner said is correct. :)