django-pgconninfo picks up PostgreSQL connection configuration from environment variables and construct a map suitable for assignment to DATABASES in Django settings. This code can handle Heroku, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, PostgreSQL service files (.pg_service.conf), libpq environment variables, and PostgreSQL password files (~/.pgpass).

The idea of pgconninfo is to avoid hardcoded database location and credentials in source code. This is desirable for several reasons:

• Credentials don't belong to source code or version control repositories.

• Switching from development to production without code change.

• Major cloud services already adopted environment variables for configuration.

For more on configuration through the environment, check the twelve-factor app.

You can install django-pgconninfo via Pypi:

pip install django-pgconninfo

To use the default engine (psycopg2):

from pgconninfo import pg_conninfo

DATABASES = {
    'default': pg_conninfo()
}

or, to use an alternative engine, explicitly state the engine class:

from pgconninfo import pg_conninfo

DATABASES = {
    'default': pg_conninfo('django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis')
}

pg_conninfo can configure the database connection using any of the following environment variables:

• DATABASE_URL

  This is a standard PostgreSQL environment variable and is used by Heroku. The format of this variable is described in PostgreSQL's documentation

• RDS_HOSTNAME, RDS_PORT, RDS_DB_NAME, RDS_USERNAME, and RDS_PASSWORD

  These are the environment variables used by AWS Elastic Beanstalk and are documented in their developer guide

• PGSERVICE, and optionally PGSERVICEFILE

  PostgreSQL's documentation describes the location and format of connection service files and the configuration keywords to be used in them

• PGHOST, PGPORT, PGDATABASE, PGUSER, and PGPASSWORD

  The libpq environment variables are described in PostgreSQL's documentation

In addition to environment variables, pg_conninfo also checks the password file if no password was given elsewhere.