Mysterious Postgres connection bug

This wierd thing happened with me today where I was unable to run some migrations of my Django app.

So I created new database, filled up correct environment variables and again, same issue was happening.

Here is screenshot of the issue.

Since I created a new container for postgres. It shouldn’t happen. I started to dig deep.

First step was to check all my enviroment variables that looks like this.

PGDATABASE="pillow"
PGPASSWORD="pillowconnect"
PGUSER="pillow"
PGHOST="localhost"
PGPORT="5431"
DATABASE_NAME="pillow"

And here is my database settings in my settings.py page

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
        'NAME': os.environ.get('PGDATABASE'),
        'USER': os.environ.get('PGUSER'),
        'PASSWORD': os.environ.get('PGPASSWORD'),
        'HOST': os.environ.get('PGHOST'),
        'PORT': os.environ.get('PGPORT'),
    }
}

I echoed all environment variables in my shell to double check if all are correct.

THEY WERE!!!

Then I typed the command: python manage.py dbshell and below is the output.

There was one small issue with it. I was inside postgres database, instead I should be inside pillowdatabase.

I became suspecious and started to dig little further. I stopped my system’s postgres and removed socket file which is usually located inside /tmp directory.

Still, same issue persisted.

I wanted to check the directory from which data was being read, so I ran the following command:

show data_directory;

Below is the output:

This is the root cause for all. Postgres is not getting connected to my container.

Then I typed python manage.py migrate command in my iTerm terminal instead of Cursor Terminal.

It ran perfectly. In order to verify, I ran python manage.py dbshell from my iTerm terminal. Below is the output:

My hypothesis is there might be a bug inside Cursor’s terminal that caused above issue. Although I am not sure how it happened.

Please comment if you know what might have happened.

Update

Running command: set -a; source .env.local; set +a; worked.

By sandwiching source .env.local between set -a and set +a:

• Temporarily enable automatic exporting.
• Load environment variables from .env.local.
• Disable automatic exporting to prevent polluting the environment.

Thankfully, it is not a bug. Just an issue with environment variables not being exported correctly.