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ruby-on-railspostgresqlheroku

Credentials to postgresql database on Heroku seems to have been changed

I have a Ruby on Rails app with a posgresql database running on Heroku. In my config/database.yml file, I have the following entry

production: &deploy
  encoding: utf8
  min_messages: warning
  pool: <%= [Integer(ENV.fetch("MAX_THREADS", 5)), Integer(ENV.fetch("DB_POOL", 5))].max %>
  timeout: 5000
  url:  <%= ENV.fetch("DATABASE_URL", "") %>

so I am expecting Heroku to handle the database setup and credentials.

The app has been operating successfully for several years. Since Heroku database maintenance, when I try to run the app, I get an error message FATAL: password authentication failed for user: "xyz". If I do heroku config the DATABASE_URL is of the form postgres://xyz:some_long_hash, which seems to imply that xyz is the correct username.

However if I go into heroku web portal, I can view the database credentials, the listed user name is not xyz but some other user name, and there is a very long password.

How do I fix this?

Solution

  • Based on this article from Heroku Support, I needed to rotate the credentials manually. I did this with

    heroku pg:credentials:rotate

    which worked.

    Evidently with with the Hobby/Mini/Tier, when Heroku does maintenance, this problem can occur. You can check if the credentials are valid with

    pg:credentials:url -a <appname>

    Based on a comment by max, I will be deleting from config/database.yml the line

      url:  <%= ENV.fetch("DATABASE_URL", "") %>

    and replacing it with a comment to the effect that heroku chooses the url and stores it as config variable DATABASE_URL.