[Django]-OperationalError: database is locked

In my case, It was because I open the database from SQLite Browser. When I close it from the browser, the problem is gone.

I slightly disagree with the accepted answer which, by quoting this doc, implicitly links OP’s problem (Database is locked) to this:

Switching to another database backend. At a certain point SQLite becomes too "lite" for real-world applications, and these sorts of concurrency errors indicate you’ve reached that point.

This is a bit "too easy" to incriminate SQlite for this problem (which is very powerful when correctly used; it’s not only a toy for small databases, fun fact: An SQLite database is limited in size to 140 terabytes ).

Unless you have a very busy server with thousands of connections at the same second, the reason for this Database is locked error is probably more a bad use of the API, than a problem inherent to SQlite which would be "too light". Here are more informations about Implementation Limits for SQLite.

Now the solution:

I had the same problem when I was using two scripts using the same database at the same time:

• one was accessing the DB with write operations
• the other was accessing the DB in read-only

Solution: always do cursor.close() as soon as possible after having done a (even read-only) query.

Here are more details.

The practical reason for this is often that the python or django shells have opened a request to the DB and it wasn’t closed properly; killing your terminal access often frees it up. I had this error on running command line tests today.

Edit: I get periodic upvotes on this. If you’d like to kill access without rebooting the terminal, then from commandline you can do:

from django import db
db.connections.close_all()

As others have told, there is another process that is using the SQLite file and has not closed the connection. In case you are using Linux, you can see which processes are using the file (for example db.sqlite3) using the fuser command as follows:

$ sudo fuser -v db.sqlite3
                     USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/path/to/db.sqlite3:
                     user        955 F....  apache2

If you want to stop the processes to release the lock, use fuser -k which sends the KILL signal to all processes accessing the file:

sudo fuser -k db.sqlite3

Note that this is dangerous as it might stop the web server process in a production server.

Thanks to @cz-game for pointing out fuser!

I got this error when using a database file saved under WSL (\\wsl$ …) and running a windows python interpreter.

You can either not save the database in your WSL-tree or use a linux based interpreter in your distro.

I encountered this error message in a situation that is not (clearly) addressed by the help info linked in patrick’s answer.

When I used transaction.atomic() to wrap a call to FooModel.objects.get_or_create() and called that code simultaneously from two different threads, only one thread would succeed, while the other would get the “database is locked” error. Changing the timeout database option had no effect on the behavior.

I think this is due to the fact that sqlite cannot handle multiple simultaneous writers, so the application must serialize writes on their own.

I solved the problem by using a threading.RLock object instead of transaction.atomic() when my Django app is running with a sqlite backend. That’s not entirely equivalent, so you may need to do something else in your application.

Here’s my code that runs FooModel.objects.get_or_create simultaneously from two different threads, in case it is helpful:

from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor

import configurations
configurations.setup()

from django.db import transaction
from submissions.models import ExerciseCollectionSubmission

def makeSubmission(user_id):
    try:
        with transaction.atomic():
            e, _ = ExerciseCollectionSubmission.objects.get_or_create(
                student_id=user_id, exercise_collection_id=172)
    except Exception as e:
        return f'failed: {e}'

    e.delete()

    return 'success'


futures = []

with ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=2) as executor:
    futures.append(executor.submit(makeSubmission, 296))
    futures.append(executor.submit(makeSubmission, 297))

for future in futures:
    print(future.result())

I was facing this issue in my flask app because I opened the database in SQLite Browser and forgot to write the changes.

If you have also made any changes in SQLite Browser, then click on write changes and everything will be fine.

For me it gets resolved once I closed the django shell which was opened using python manage.py shell

This also could happen if you are connected to your sqlite db via dbbrowser plugin through pycharm. Disconnection will solve the problem

I’ve got the same error! One of the reasons was the DB connection was not closed.
Therefore, check for unclosed DB connections. Also, check if you have committed the DB before closing the connection.

I had a similar error, right after the first instantiation of Django (v3.0.3). All recommendations here did not work apart from:

• deleted the db.sqlite3 file and lose the data there, if any,
• python manage.py makemigrations
• python manage.py migrate

Btw, if you want to just test PostgreSQL:

docker run --rm --name django-postgres \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mypassword \
  -e PGPORT=5432 \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=myproject \
  -p 5432:5432 \
  postgres:9.6.17-alpine

Change the settings.py to add this DATABASES:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
        'NAME': 'myproject',
        'USER': 'postgres',
        'PASSWORD': 'mypassword',
        'HOST': 'localhost',
        'PORT': '5432',
    }
}

…and add database adapter:

pip install psycopg2-binary

Then the usual:

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

Check if your database is opened on another DB Browser.

If it is opened on an other application, then close the application and run the program again.

Just close (stop) and open (start) the database. This solved my problem.

I found this worked for my needs. (thread locking) YMMV
conn = sqlite3.connect(database, timeout=10)

https://docs.python.org/3/library/sqlite3.html

sqlite3.connect(database[, timeout, detect_types, isolation_level, check_same_thread, factory, cached_statements, uri])

When a database is accessed by multiple connections, and one of the processes modifies the database, the SQLite database is locked until that transaction is committed. The timeout parameter specifies how long the connection should wait for the lock to go away until raising an exception. The default for the timeout parameter is 5.0 (five seconds).

In my case, I added a new record manually saved and again through shell tried to add new record this time it works perfectly check it out.

In [7]: from main.models import Flight

In [8]: f = Flight(origin="Florida", destination="Alaska", duration=10)

In [9]: f.save()

In [10]: Flight.objects.all() 
Out[10]: <QuerySet [<Flight: Flight object (1)>, <Flight: Flight object (2)>, <Flight: Flight object (3)>, <Flight: Flight object (4)>]>

actually I have faced same problem , when I use "transaction.atomic() with select_for_update() " i got error message "the OperationalError: database is locked" ,

and after many tries / searching / read django docs ,
i found the problem from SQLite itself it is not support select_for_update method as django DOCs says , kindly have a look at the following url and read it deeply:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/databases/#database-is-locked-errors

, and when i moved to MySQL everything goes fine .

as django DOCs also says "database is locked" may happen when database timeout occur ,
they recommend you to change database timeout by setting up the following option :

'OPTIONS': {
    # ...
    'timeout': 20,
    # ...
}

finally, I recommend you to use MySQL/PostgreSQL even if you working on development environment .

I hope this helpful for you .

In my case, I had not saved a database operation I performed within the SQLite Browser. Saving it solved the issue.

A very unusual scenario, which happened to me.

There was infinite recursion, which kept creating the objects.

More specifically, using DRF, I was overriding create method in a view, and I did

def create(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    ....
    ....

    return self.create(request, *args, **kwargs)

Already lot of Answers are available here, even I want to share my case , this may help someone..

I have opened the connection in Python API to update values, I’ll close connection only after receiving server response. Here what I did was I have opened connection to do some other operation in server as well before closing the connection in Python API.

If you get this error while using manage.py shell, one possible reason is that you have a development server running (manage.py runserver) which is locking the database. Stoping the server while using the shell has always fixed the problem for me.

I got this error when attempting to create a new table in SQLite but the session object contained uncommitted (though flushed) changes.

Make sure to either:

1. Commit the session(s) before creating a new table
2. Close all sessions and perform the table creation in a new connection
3. …

@Shilp Thapak‘s answer is correct: the reason for the error is that you did not write your manual changes to the data in your DB Browser for SQLite before running your application.

If you didn’t write the changes in whatever SQL client you are using, you can still create the engine but

engine.connect()

will throw the operational error about the database being locked.

You can check whether your engine can connect by checking the existence of a rollback journal. The default mode of a rollback journal is to be created and deleted at the start and end of a transaction.

It is exists in the same directory where your database is, it has the same name as the database file and the suffix "-journal" appended.

If the mode is not changed, at Journal mode in Edit pragmas panel in DB Browser for SQLite.

You can check the existence of the temp file like so:

if os.path.isfile('your-database.sqlite-journal'):
    print("The database is locked. Please write your changes in your SQL client before proceeding.\n")

Read more about temporary files here.

So no need to close the server or DB Browser for SQLite for that sake. In fact, as long as all the changes are written, you can have several clients connected to the database simultaneously and still run your application at the same time.

if youre using more than one development editors working on that poject, it may cause the same error.

for example, spyder and vscode running the same ‘prj.py’ file, creates a conflict in some processes, like deleting records.

For me it was simply because I was accessing the database in SQLite app at the same time of running my Python code to create a new table.
Closing SQLite until the code is done solved my issue.

UPDATE django version 2.1.7

I got this error sqlite3.OperationalError: database is locked using pytest with django.

Solution:

If we are using @pytest.mark.django_db decorator. What it does is create a in-memory-db for testing.

Named: file:memorydb_default?mode=memory&cache=shared We can get this name with:

from django.db import connection
db_path = connection.settings_dict['NAME']

To access this database and also edit it, do:

Connect to the data base:

with sqlite3.connect(db_path, uri=True) as conn:
    c = conn.cursor()

Use uri=True to specifies the disk file that is the SQLite database to be opened.

To avoid the error activate transactions in the decorator:

@pytest.mark.django_db(transaction=True)

Final function:

from django.db import connection

@pytest.mark.django_db(transaction=True)
def test_mytest():
    db_path = connection.settings_dict['NAME']
    with sqlite3.connect(db_path, uri=True) as conn:
        c = conn.cursor()
        c.execute('my amazing query')
        conn.commit()
    assert ... == ....

Just reboot your server, it will clear all current processes that have your database locked.

I just needed to add alias sqlite='sqlite3' to my ~/.zshrc

I then deleted the partially-failed creation of the virtualenv in ~/.pyenv/versions/new-virtualenv and reran pyenv virtualenv <name> and it worked swimmingly

you can use
"sudo fuser -v db.sqlite3"
to determine the processes (python) accessing the db.sqlite3 then use
"sudo kill -9 PID1 PID2"
to terminate those processes and PID1 is the id of the first process and PID2 is the id of the second process etc…

try this command:

sudo fuser -k 8000/tcp