[Django]-Steps to Troubleshoot "django.db.utils.ProgrammingError: permission denied for relation django_migrations"

As mentioned by @user3062149, this is likely caused by attempting to migrate a database table for which Django’s psycopg2 user is not the table owner. For instance, if you have in your project’s settings.py

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'USER': 'my_username',
        # ...

You will need to check that the table involved in the Django migration is owned by my_username. To do this in psql, you can use SELECT * FROM pg_tables ORDER BY tableowner;. This uses the view pg_tables, which “provides access to useful information about each table in the database.” pg_tables is a part of Postgres’ system catalogs, the place where a relational database management system stores schema metadata.

Say that the table in question is owned by other_username (not my_username).

To update the owner, you then need to call psql with --username=other_username, then change the owner:

ALTER TABLE public.<table_name> OWNER TO my_username;

For people still having issues using PostgresQL, I realized I needed to update schema public for each database I was connecting to. I had a dev and a staging database I was trying to use the same user for in my case.

Each database has it’s own public schema. It’s just a namespace in the database. If you’re trying to use the user for another database, then you need to connect to each database you want to grant privileges to, and run your GRANT commands there. When you connect with a session, it’s connecting to a particular database, and the GRANT commands only apply to that particular database.

RDS might look like this:

The DB session .. say

psql -U postgres -h some.host.com -p 5432 --password db_name
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO myuser;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO myuser;

will only apply to DB name you connected to (say, db green arrow goes to, not the other). If you want to have the user work with Django for something OTHER than db_name, then you need to connect to that database and grant prileges on the public schema there too.

\c other_db

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO myuser;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO myuser;

The answers that change privileges with relation to public are no longer valid for PostgreSQL 15. If you are using Django with PGSQL version 15, the following is now the correct process for database setup.

su - postgres
psql -c "CREATE DATABASE mydatabase"
psql -c "CREATE USER myuser WITH PASSWORD 'somepassword'"
psql -d mydatabase -c "CREATE SCHEMA myschema AUTHORIZATION myuser"
psql -c "ALTER ROLE myuser SET client_encoding TO 'utf8'"
psql -c "ALTER ROLE myuser SET default_transaction_isolation TO 'read committed'"
psql -c "ALTER ROLE myuser SET timezone TO 'UTC'"

Over on the Django side, in myproject/settings.py there is an additional setting (OPTIONS) needed in the DATABASES section:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
        'OPTIONS': {
                'options': '-c search_path=myschema'
            },
        'NAME': 'mydatabase',
        'USER': 'myuser',
        'PASSWORD': 'somepassword',
        'HOST': 'localhost'
    }
}

If the above has been followed, the results should look normal and as expected:

$ python manage.py migrate
Operations to perform:
  Apply all migrations: admin, auth, contenttypes, sessions
Running migrations:
  Applying contenttypes.0001_initial... OK
  Applying auth.0001_initial... OK
  Applying admin.0001_initial... OK
  Applying admin.0002_logentry_remove_auto_add... OK
  Applying admin.0003_logentry_add_action_flag_choices... OK
  Applying contenttypes.0002_remove_content_type_name... OK
  Applying auth.0002_alter_permission_name_max_length... OK
  Applying auth.0003_alter_user_email_max_length... OK
  Applying auth.0004_alter_user_username_opts... OK
  Applying auth.0005_alter_user_last_login_null... OK
  Applying auth.0006_require_contenttypes_0002... OK
  Applying auth.0007_alter_validators_add_error_messages... OK
  Applying auth.0008_alter_user_username_max_length... OK
  Applying auth.0009_alter_user_last_name_max_length... OK
  Applying auth.0010_alter_group_name_max_length... OK
  Applying auth.0011_update_proxy_permissions... OK
  Applying auth.0012_alter_user_first_name_max_length... OK
  Applying sessions.0001_initial... OK

For postresql 15 and Django

sudo -u postgres psql database_name
GRANT CREATE ON SCHEMA public TO your_dbuser;

If you receive this error and are using the Heroku hosting platform its quite possible that you are trying to write to a Hobby level database which has a limited number of rows.

Heroku will allow you to pg:push the database even if you exceed the limits, but it will be read-only so any modifications to content won’t be processed and will throw this error.