You can connect to a Cloud.gov database using the cf-service-connect plugin. After installing it, use the command
cf connect-to-service getgov-ENVIRONMENT getgov-ENVIRONMENT-databse
to get a psql
shell on the sandbox environment's database.
When new code changes the database schema (ie, you change a model or pull some code that has), we need to apply Django's migrations.
docker-compose exec app bash
./manage.py makemigrations
Then perform docker-compose down & docker-compose up to run with the new migrations.
We can run these using CloudFoundry's tasks to run the manage.py migrate
command in the correct environment. For any developer environment, developers
can manually run the task with
cf run-task getgov-ENVIRONMENT --wait --command 'python manage.py migrate' --name migrate
(The optional 'wait' argument will wait until the environment is stable)
Optionally, load data from fixtures as well
cf run-task getgov-ENVIRONMENT --wait --command 'python manage.py load' --name loaddata
For the stable
or staging
environments, developers don't have credentials so we need to run that command using Github Actions. Go to
https://github.com/cisagov/getgov/actions/workflows/migrate.yaml and select
the "Run workflow" button, making sure that stable
or staging
depending on which envirornment you desire to update.
To run the dumpdata
command, you'll need to ssh to a running container. cf run-task
is useless for this, as you will not be able to see the output.
cf ssh getgov-ENVIRONMENT
/tmp/lifecycle/shell # this configures your environment
./manage.py dumpdata
cf connect-to-service getgov-ENVIRONMENT getgov-ENVIRONMENT-database
gets you into whichever environments database you'd like\c [table name here that starts cgaws...etc];
connects to the [cgaws...etc] table\dt
retrieves information about that table and displays it- Make sure the table you are looking for exists. For this example, we are looking for
django_migrations
- Run
SELECT * FROM django_migrations;
to see everything that's in it!
For your sandbox environment, it might be necessary to start the database over from scratch.
The easiest way to do that is DROP DATABASE ...
followed by CREATE DATABASE ...
. In the psql
shell, first run the \l
command to see all of the
databases that are present:
cgawsbrokerprodyaobv93n2g3me5i=> \l
List of databases
Name | Owner | Encoding | Collate | Ctype | Access privileges
--------------------------------+------------------+----------+-------------+-------------+---------------------------------------
cgawsbrokerprodyaobv93n2g3me5i | ugsyn42g56vtykfr | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
postgres | ugsyn42g56vtykfr | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
...
You will need the name of the database beginning with cgawsbroker...
for the
next step. To drop that database, you first have to connect to a different
database (you can't drop the database that you are connected to). We connect to
the default postgres
database instead
cgawsbrokerprodyaobv93n2g3me5i=> \c postgres;
psql (14.4, server 12.11)
SSL connection (protocol: TLSv1.2, cipher: ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384, bits: 256, compression: off)
You are now connected to database "postgres" as user "ugsyn42g56vtykfr".
Now drop and create the database with the name above.
postgres=> DROP DATABASE cgawsbrokerprodyaobv93n2g3me5i;
DROP DATABASE
postgres=> CREATE DATABASE cgawsbrokerprodyaobv93n2g3me5i;
CREATE DATABASE
Now the database is empty and Django will need to re-run all of its migrations in order for the app to start again.
This is a very intrusive procedure and it can go wrong in a number of ways.
For example, if the running cloud.gov application goes down, the
connect-to-service
SSH tunnel will go away and if the app can't come back up
(say, because the database has been dropped but not created) then it isn't
possible to SSH back into the database to fix it and the Cloudfoundry
resources may have to be completely deleted and re-created.