Configuring django south with PostgreSQL

Question

I can't get my site running with south. I've successfully installed south, and I can 'import south' successfully.

./manage.py shell
>>> import south
>>>

However, once I add 'south' to INSTALLED_APPS, and run ./manage.py syncdb (to complete the installation), I get the following error:

There is no South database module 'south.db.django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2' for your database. Please either choose a supported database, check for SOUTH_DATABASE_ADAPTER[S] settings, or remove South from INSTALLED_APPS.

I'm using a PostgreSQL database, and the postgresql_psycopg2 library. I'm confused, because Postgres is definitely a supported database. Do I need to manually configure SOUTH_DATABASE_ADAPTER in settings.py?

Edit: Here are my database settings. I know they work -- the (test) server I'm trying to get this running on has been talking to the DB properly for weeks.

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'postgresql_psycopg2' 
DATABASE_NAME = 'iknowthisiscorrect' 
DATABASE_HOST = '' #localhost
DATABASE_PORT = '5432'  # I've configured Postgres to use this port

Answer 1

I found this comment in the South source code. Look at line #63.

 63     # This error should only be triggered on 1.1 and below. 
64      sys.stderr.write( 
65          ( 
66              "There is no South database module '%s' for your database. " + \ 
67              "Please either choose a supported database, check for " + \ 
68              "SOUTH_DATABASE_ADAPTER[S] settings, " + \ 
69              "or remove South from INSTALLED_APPS.\n" 
70          ) % (module_name,) 

Which version of Django are you using? Is it <=1.1?

Answer 2

This is actually a bug in the later versions of south, they're not completely backwardly compatible and assume an import from django.db.utils which doesn't exist until django 1.2.

You can patch around this very basically, open up south/db/generic.py and edit line 6:

try:
    from django.db.utils import DatabaseError
except:
    from django.db import DatabaseError

Note: this import is also in other db/*.py files, but I'm not using oracle or firebird so haven't tested with those.

Second note: doesn't help that django 1.1 transactions aren't alias aware and probably won't let south actually work.

Answer 3

Which versions of South and Django are you using? If you're on Django 1.2 you need to be using the latest version of South.

This line in the South codebase shows that it sets its own database adapter from the main project settings file's database settings if no specific SOUTH_DATABASE_ADAPTERS are set. This implies that your DB settings themselves might be wrong, perhaps?

Can you update your question with your database settings (minus passwords), please?

Answer 4

If you are using Django 1.1, using South 0.7.0 should work. You can download it from here. I don't know if other versions would work, I only tried 0.7.0 for Postgres 8.3 and 8.4.