Postgres password authentication failed during first startup in Dockerised Archetype

[pastokes]

In a recent clean install of Dockerised Archetype, on first running after install, startup failed due to password authentication failure in the Django connection to the PostgreSQL server (see screenshot below).

It turns out that there was no app_digipal user in the database (and indeed no digipal database), and so Django couldn't connect.

The workaround was to go in and manually create the digipal database and the app user (following the details in settings.py), after which it ran fine.

I've only seen this error once in the Dockerised version (and once when I installed Archetype as a shared instance following the Docker build file). I guess there's not much we can do, but I'm noting it in case others have seen it and in case the workaround is helpful to anyone else.

[geoffroy-noel-ddh]

Thanks for reporting that. Do you know what was the OS, whether the data folder had been shared already or Archetype been installed before on that machine?

Was that a one-off incident or do you think it is happening systematically with the latest release of Archetype?

[pastokes]

I think it's one-off.

Apparently the case that failed was an entirely clean install onto a new machine.

It's running MacOS 10.13 (High Sierra), which is the same as mine by chance. I tried deleting the image and data folder on my own system and then reinstalling and it ran fine.

As mentioned, the only other time I've seen it was again a recent install, but in that case I did the install as a shared instance without Docker, manually following the steps in the Docker build file as you suggest. It all worked perfectly except that, again, I had to create the DB and user manually. In this case it was on a Raspberry Pi running Rasbian (Debian) Buster.

(In case you're wondering why I installed it on a Raspberry Pi, it was partly to see if I could and partly with the idea of bringing it to workshops for people who can't get Docker to run. It works perfectly well, though unsurprisingly performance isn't the best and I still need to play with timeout settings as it gives a lot of 504 errors.)

[pastokes]

As a follow-up in case others have the same problem, I've added a note with the workaround on the 'Installing and Running Archetype' page on the wiki: https://github.com/kcl-ddh/digipal/wiki/Installing-and-Running-Archetype#database-connection-error