could not translate host name "db" to address when running Django test in Docker through PyCharm

Question

I have a simple Django project with a PostgreSQL backend:

version: '3'
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:12
    ports:
      - '5432:5432'
    volumes:
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data/
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: pycharm
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: pw123
      POSTGRES_DB: pycharm

  app:
    build: .
    command: python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
    ports:
      - '8000:8000'
    volumes:
      - .:/app
    depends_on:
      - db

volumes:
  postgres_data:

With the following database settings in settings.py:

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.postgresql",
        "NAME": "pycharm",
        "USER": "pycharm",
        "PASSWORD": "pw123",
        "HOST": "db",
    }
}

And a simple test:

from django.test import TestCase

class MyTestCase(TestCase):

    def test_example(self):
        assert 1 == 1

Everything works fine when I run the project with docker-compose:

docker-compose up

I can exec into the container running the django app and successfully execute the test:

docker-compose run app bash
$ python manage.py test demo.tests.MyTestCase
Creating test database for alias 'default'...
System check identified no issues (0 silenced).
.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 0.002s

OK
Destroying test database for alias 'default'...

I want to run the test in PyCharm, instead of having to exec into the container every time. I've setup the remote interpreter using Docker. However, when I run the test in PyCharm I get the following error:

django.db.utils.OperationalError: could not translate host name "db" to address: Name or service not known

It appears the app container can't find the database container when I run the test in PyCharm. This brings about two questions:

Is there anyway to fix this so the app container can find the database container? I know docker networking on localhost is tricky.
Is there anyway to setup the tests so they don't need to connect to the database container? I feel like Django or psycopg2 should be able to spin up a mock PostgreSQL service for the tests.

One way I've fixed this in the past is to use sqlite3 for my test database; however, I'm using fields that are not compatible with sqlite (such as ArrayField) so that's not an option.

Does this answer your question? Django docker - could not translate host name "db" to address: nodename nor servname provided, or not known -- maybe you need to link in docker-compose? — richyen
u need to set the port on ur configuration on settings.py and try to use postgres 11 — khaled hadjali

khaled hadjali khaled hadjali · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-14T09:41:40

in ur yml file try to change

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:11

in ur settings.py :

 DATABASES = {
        "default": {
            "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2",
            "NAME": "pycharm",
            "USER": "pycharm",
            "PASSWORD": "pw123",
            "HOST": "db",
            "PORT":5432,
        }
    }

could not translate host name "db" to address when running Django test in Docker through PyCharm

2 Answers