Connect a Django application to Neon

Pre-built prompt for connecting Django applications to Neon

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To connect to Neon from a Django application:

Prerequisites

• A Neon account and project with connection parameters ready
• Python 3.8+ installed
• An existing Django project (or create one with django-admin startproject myproject)

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate   # macOS / Linux
# venv\Scripts\activate    # Windows

Install the PostgreSQL driver

Install psycopg (the modern psycopg3 driver) and python-dotenv inside your virtual environment:

pip install "psycopg[binary]" python-dotenv

1. Create a Neon project

   If you do not have one already, create a Neon project. Save your connection details including your password. They are required when defining connection settings.

   To create a Neon project:

   1. Navigate to the Projects page in the Neon Console.
   2. Click New Project.
   3. Specify your project settings and click Create Project.

2. Configure Django connection settings

   Connecting to Neon requires configuring database connection settings in your Django project's settings.py file.

   note

   To avoid the endpoint ID is not specified connection issue described here, be sure that you are using an up-to-date driver.

   In your Django project, navigate to the DATABASES section of your settings.py file and modify the connection details as shown:

   # Add these at the top of your settings.py
   from os import getenv
   from dotenv import load_dotenv
   
   load_dotenv()
   
   # Replace the DATABASES section of your settings.py with this
   DATABASES = {
     'default': {
       'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
       'NAME': getenv('PGDATABASE'),
       'USER': getenv('PGUSER'),
       'PASSWORD': getenv('PGPASSWORD'),
       'HOST': getenv('PGHOST'),
       'PORT': getenv('PGPORT', 5432),
       'OPTIONS': {
         'sslmode': 'require',
       },
       'DISABLE_SERVER_SIDE_CURSORS': True,
       'CONN_HEALTH_CHECKS': True,
     }
   }

   note

   Neon places computes into an idle state and closes connections after 5 minutes of inactivity (see Compute lifecycle). To avoid connection errors, you can set the Django CONN_MAX_AGE setting to 0 to close database connections at the end of each request so that your application does not attempt to reuse connections that were closed by Neon. From Django 4.1, you can use a higher CONN_MAX_AGE setting in combination with the CONN_HEALTH_CHECKS setting to enable connection reuse while preventing errors that might occur due to closed connections. For more information about these configuration options, see Connection management, in the Django documentation.

   You can find all of the connection details listed above by clicking the Connect button on your Project Dashboard to open the Connect to your database modal. For more information, see Connect from any application.

   For additional information about Django project settings, see Django Settings: Databases, in the Django documentation.

3. Test the connection

   Create a simple view to verify the database connection is working.

   1. In your project's main app directory (next to urls.py), create views.py:

      from django.http import JsonResponse
      from django.db import connection
      
      def db_version(request):
          with connection.cursor() as cursor:
              cursor.execute("SELECT version();")
              version = cursor.fetchone()[0]
          return JsonResponse({'version': version})

   2. Add a URL route in your project's urls.py:

      from django.contrib import admin
      from django.urls import path
      from . import views
      
      urlpatterns = [
          path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
          path('', views.db_version, name='db_version'),
      ]

   3. Run migrations and start the server:

      python manage.py migrate
      python manage.py runserver

   4. Visit http://localhost:8000 to see the PostgreSQL version from your Neon database.

Connection issues

• Django uses the psycopg2 driver as the default adapter for Postgres. If you have an older version of that driver, you may encounter an Endpoint ID is not specified error when connecting to Neon. This error occurs if the client library used by your driver does not support the Server Name Indication (SNI) mechanism in TLS, which Neon uses to route incoming connections. The psycopg2 driver uses the libpq client library, which supports SNI as of v14. You can check your psycopg2 and libpq versions by starting a Django shell in your Django project and running the following commands:

  # Start a Django shell
  python3 manage.py shell
  
  # Check versions
  import psycopg2
  print("psycopg2 version:", psycopg2.__version__)
  print("libpq version:", psycopg2._psycopg.libpq_version())

  The version number for libpq is presented in a different format, for example, version 14.1 will be shown as 140001. If your libpq version is less than version 14, you can either upgrade your psycopg2 driver to get a newer libpq version or use one of the workarounds described in our Connection errors documentation. Upgrading your psycopg2 driver may introduce compatibility issues with your Django or Python version, so you should test your application thoroughly.

• If you encounter an SSL SYSCALL error: EOF detected when connecting to the database, this typically occurs because the application is trying to reuse a connection after the Neon compute has been suspended due to inactivity. To resolve this issue, try one of the following options:

  • Set your Django CONN_MAX_AGE setting to a value less than or equal to the scale to zero setting configured for your compute. The default is 5 minutes (300 seconds).
  • Enable CONN_HEALTH_CHECKS by setting it to true. This forces a health check to verify that the connection is alive before executing a query.

  For information configuring Neon's Scale to zero setting, see Configuring Scale to zero for Neon computes.

Schema migration with Django

For schema migration with Django, see our guide:

• 

  Django Migrations

  Schema migration with Neon Postgres and Django

Django application blog post and sample application

Learn how to use Django with Neon Postgres with this blog post and the accompanying sample application.

• 

  Blog Post: Using Django with Neon

  Learn how to build a Django application with Neon Postgres

• 

  Django sample application

  Django with Neon Postgres

Community resources

• Django Project: Build a Micro eCommerce with Python, Django, Neon Postgres, Stripe, & TailwindCSS

Next steps

• Set up Neon Auth: Add managed authentication that branches with your database.