Heroku gotcha

[Sam Pierson]

Hello,

Last night I setup a PostGIS app at Heroku using activerecord-postgis-adapter.   I thought I would share my experience in those hope that it saves someone the 3 hour detour I had.  Jump to the bold part for the gotcha that roadblocked me.

I'm using:

rails (3.2.7)

activerecord-postgis-adapter (0.4.3)

rgeo (0.3.14)

rgeo-activerecord (0.4.5)

I had an app functioning perfectly on my local machine, talking to PostgreSQL 9.1.4 / POSTGIS="2.0.0 r9605"

Then I got to Heroku...

I provisioned one of their "Ronin" DBs ($200/mo ouch) - the lowest level that supports PostGIS:

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:ronin --postgis=true version=9.0

heroku pg:wait

heroku pg:promote HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_CYAN

heroku pg:psql

SELECT PostGIS_Full_Version();

POSTGIS="1.5.2" GEOS="3.3.3-CAPI-1.7.4" PROJ="Rel. 4.7.1, 23 September 2009" LIBXML="2.7.6" USE_STATS

What I failed to notice was that Heroku sets its database adapter using the scheme:// part of it's DATABASE_URL, and the default set for its postgis enabled database is still "postgres".  You need to switch this from "postgres" to "postgis" by:

Run heroku config

Find the URL of your PostGIS enable databsae, e.g. for me it was HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_CYAN_URL

Then set DATABASE_URL to that URL, but with "postgis://" instead of "postgres://", e.g.:

heroku config:add DATABASE_URL='postgis://user:pass...@host.compute-1.amazonaws.com:port/dbname'

Now I have fixed this everything is running flawlessly and identically locally and on Heroku.

___________________________________________________________________________

Here are some of the error signatures I ran into while debugging, for those folks Googling error strings trying to solve this:

When I tried to migrate, my migration that created a spacial index failed with:

PG::Error: ERROR:  data type point has no default operator class for access method "btree"

HINT:  You must specify an operator class for the index or define a default operator class for the data type.

: CREATE  INDEX "index_user_feedback_on_latlon" ON "user_feedback" ("latlon")

I switched the migration to create the index using SQL instead, and got past that, only to have the app fail to boot with:

app/models/location.rb:7:in `<class:Location>': uninitialized constant Location::RGeo (NameError)

So I included rgeo, then got an error about set_rgeo_factory_for_column.

So I included rgeo-activerecord instead.

My point column was still being treated as just a string, however.

While debugging in the console I finally discovered that ActiveRecord::Base.connection was an ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::PostgreSQLAdapter, which pointed me in the right direction.

-Sam.

[Toby Rahilly]

Hi Sam,

Setting the schema to 'postgis' will break other heroku add-ons that also read the the DATABASE_URL config.

Most notably, it breaks the PGBackups addon, which was a show stopper for us.

Instead we left the the schema url as 'postgres', and monkey patched ActiveRecord::Base::ConnectionSpecification::Resolver::connection_url_to_hash to override the schema back to 'postgis'.

Cheers,

Toby

www.roam7.com

[Daniel Docki]

Sorry Toby, but I did not understand how I pass the url of the database? and where do I put this line?

Daniel Docki
Skype: daniel.docki
MSN/Gtalk: daniel...@gmail.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/danieldocki

[Daniel Docki]

Hi There,

I followed the footsteps of Sam, data is being saved in the database, but when I try to use some method of RGEO gives me an error:

RGeo::Error::UnsupportedOperation (Method Geometry#within? not defined.)

Why? How I can solve that?

Daniel Docki
Skype: daniel.docki
MSN/Gtalk: daniel...@gmail.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/danieldocki