Installing Django, PostgreSQL on Google Compute Engine Debian 7 Instance - django

Question

I am trying to deploy a Django application on Google Compute Engine. I'm using a Debian 7 image and want to set up Django with Nginx, Gunicorn, virtualenv, supervisor and PostgreSQL. I have everything running fine on my development machine which is running Ubuntu 14.04 with Django installed and PostgreSQL as the backend.
I'm using the tutorial located at http://datacommunitydc.org/blog/2013/12/a-tutorial-for-deploying-a-django-application-that-uses-numpy-and-scipy-to-google-compute-engine-using-apache2-and-modwsgi/. I'm also using the tutorial located at http://michal.karzynski.pl/blog/2013/06/09/django-nginx-gunicorn-virtualenv-supervisor/ as it's specific to virtualenv and PostgreSQL which I'm using on my development machine. I've setup my GCE instance, instaled and updated aptitude. I've installed PostgreSQL however when I attempt to create a database user and a new database for the app I get an error and nothing is created.
Following the tutorial I've run:
$ sudo su - postgres
postgres#django:~$ createuser -P
Enter name of role to add: hello_django
Enter password for new role:
Enter it again:
Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) n
Shall the new role be allowed to create databases? (y/n) n
Shall the new role be allowed to create more new roles? (y/n) n
When it attempts to create the new user role I receive the following error:
createuser: could not connect to database postgres: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
When I run the shell script ls /etc/init.d it says that postgresql is running, but I still can't add the new role. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?
Regards.

Answer 1

I wasn't able to reproduce the issue on my end, but it appears to be an issue with PostgreSQL and its dependencies. You can try removing all installed PostgreSQL components and dependencies and then reinstalling PostgreSQL:
sudo apt-get remove --purge postgresql-9.1*
sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1
If it's still unable to connect to the database, the issue might be originating from your $PATH, in which case you'll need to point it to /usr/local/bin/psql.

Answer 2

I have just had the same problem.
This is most likely cause the postgres cluster has not been initialised yet.
And the reason that this didn't install automatically is because you have set up the locale of the box yet. This is something that has to be done on Amazon EC2 instances as well.
You need to run:
sudo apt-get install locales
And then:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
I had to choose which locales I wanted to setup, I chose en_AU UTF-8.
After this I rebooted, then I could run this to initialise the cluster:
sudo pg_createcluster 9.1 main --start
This started the service and created the pg_hba.conf files etc.

Answer 3

I faced a similar problem a while back. It can resolved using a few simple steps:
As postgres user run : initdb --locale en_US.UTF-8 -E UTF8 -D 'var/lib/postgres/data'. Note depending on the distro postgres in the command can be pgsql. You can easily check if the directory exists with an ls command.
systemctl start postgresql (if you have systemd) or just a /etc/init.d/postgresql start should do. These commands must be rub as the superuser.
All this is from the ArchWiki.