Regarding the database in Pythonanywhere

Question

I am following the Djangogirls tutorial according to which I added new posts in the blog on the Django admin. I created a template using Django templates to display this Dynamic data. I checked it by opening 127.0.0.1:8000 in browser and I was able to see the data. Then for deploying this site on Pythonanywhere, I pushed the data to github from my local rep using git push and did git pull on Pythonanywhere from github.All the files including the db.sqlite3(database) file were updated properly in pythonanywhere but still I could not the see the data after running my webapp on pythonanywhere.Then , I manually removed the db.sqlite3 file from pythonanywhere and uploaded the same file from my local desktop and it worked. Why did this work? and is there an alternative for this?

Answer 1

That's kind of odd; if the SQLite DB was in the git repository, and was uploaded correctly, I'd expect it to work. Perhaps the database is in a different directory? On PythonAnywhere, the working directory of your running web app might be (actually, probably is) different to your local machine. And if you're specifying the database using a relative path (which you probably are) then that might mean that the one you created locally is somewhere different to where it is on PythonAnywhere.

BTW, from my memories of the Django Girls tutorial (I coached for one session a few months ago) you're not actually expected to put the database in your Git repository. It's not how websites are normally managed. You'd normally have one database locally, for testing, where you'd be able to put random testing data, and then a completely different one on your live site, with posts for public consumption.