heroku PostGIS syncdb error
Question: I am having trouble getting a simple GeoDjango app running on heroku. I have
created the postgis extension for my database but I am not able to run syncdb
without getting the following error:

    
    
    from django.contrib.gis.geometry.backend import Geometry
    File "/app/.heroku/python/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/contrib/gis/geometry/backend/__init__.py", line 14, in <module>
    '"%s".' % geom_backend)
    django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Could not import user-defined GEOMETRY_BACKEND "geos".
    

Any ideas what I am doing wrong? Also does anyone know of a tutorial for
getting a simple geodjango project running on heroku? Thanks for your help


Answer: I ran into this same issue and Joe is correct, you are missing a buildpack.
What I did differently was include both the heroku-geo-buildpack and the
heroku-buildpack-python. Both can be included by using the heroku-buildpack-
multi and adding a ".buildpacks" file to your home directory in which to
include the other buildpacks.

<https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi>

So set buildpack-multi as your buildpack and add a .buildpacks file in your
project base directory:

    
    
    $ heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git
    $ touch .buildpacks
    
    # .buildpacks
    https://github.com/cyberdelia/heroku-geo-buildpack.git#1.0
    https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-python
    

When you push this, Heroku will install the software packages required to run
python (python, pip, etc), along with the software packages required to run
postgis (geos, proj and gdal).

I gave heroku-buildpack-geodjango a try but I believe it might be out of date
(hasn't been updated in a year).

