I think trying to get sqlite3 working with dokku is more trouble than it’s worth because the container has tons of permission issues with the persistent storage. Time to use postgresql in production.

Postgresql dokku plugin

$ dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-postgres.git postgres

Create Postgres db service in dokku

$ dokku postgres:create commit-redux-db

Link service to app

$ dokku postgres:link commit-redux-db commit-redux

This showed an error because I hadn’t added the pg gem to the Gemfile. I also had to fix my environment.rb file.

if ENV['RACK_ENV'] == 'production'
  set :database, ENV['DATABASE_URL']
else
  set :database, { adapter: 'sqlite3', database: 'db/development.sqlite3' }
end

So with this changed, I ran $ dokku postgres:link commit-redux-db commit-redux again, but it said the db was already linked.

I ran the migration with $ dokku run commit-redux rake db:migrate

Which showed:

rake aborted!
Errno::EACCES: Permission denied @ rb_sysopen - db/schema.rb (Errno::EACCES)

It seems like this was due to how I had configured my environment.rb file, so I fixed it with:

db_config = if ENV['RACK_ENV'] == 'production'
  { adapter: 'postgresql', url: ENV['DATABASE_URL'] }
else
  { adapter: 'sqlite3', database: 'db/development.sqlite3' }
end

set :database, db_config

Now let’s hope migrations work 🤞

$ dokku run commit-redux rake db:migrate

and… same issue :-(