britone mwasaru

When deploying to Heroku and use a database it creates the DATABASE_URL environment variable for you that you can connect your application with.

With python you can access this using the os module as follow:

os.environ.get('DATABASE_URL')

Though you might need to access the different details like; database name, user and password. Here is how I get to access this details, in this example I am using ClearDB, MySQL host provider.

import os


if os.environ.get('CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL'):
    db_url = os.environ['CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL']
    mysql_database = db_url.split('/')[3]
    mysql_user = db_url.split('//')[1].split(':')[0]
    mysql_password = db_url.split('@')[0].split(':')[2]
    mysql_host = db_url.split('@')[1].split('/')[0]
else:
    mysql_database = ""
    mysql_user = ""
    mysql_password = ""
    mysql_host = "localhost"

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