Database

How OWASP Nest uses PostgreSQL, pgvector, Django ORM migrations, and Algolia for data storage and search.

PostgreSQL

OWASP Nest uses PostgreSQL as its primary database. The Django ORM manages all schema changes through versioned migration files located in each app’s migrations/ directory.

Connection settings are configured through environment variables:

Variable	Description
DJANGO_DB_HOST	Database server hostname
DJANGO_DB_PORT	Database server port (default 5432)
DJANGO_DB_NAME	Database name
DJANGO_DB_USER	Database username
DJANGO_DB_PASSWORD	Database password

See Environment variables for the full reference.

pgvector

The pgvector PostgreSQL extension is used to store high-dimensional vector embeddings generated by OpenAI. These embeddings power the AI retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) features in the ai app, enabling semantic search over OWASP content such as projects, chapters, repositories, and Slack messages.

The pgvector Python package (pgvector = "^0.4.1") is listed as a core dependency in pyproject.toml.

Migrations

OWASP Nest uses Django’s built-in migration framework. Migrations are auto-generated from model changes and applied with manage.py migrate.

# Generate new migration files after model changes
make migrations

# Apply all pending migrations
make migrate

# Merge diverging migration branches
make merge-migrations

Never modify existing migration files that have already been applied in production. Always generate a new migration to change a schema.

Key models

OWASP app

Model	Description
Project	An OWASP project with level, type, leader, and health metrics.
Chapter	A regional OWASP chapter with geographic coordinates, country, and region.
Committee	An OWASP committee.
Event	A scheduled OWASP event.
Snapshot	A periodic community snapshot recording new projects, chapters, issues, releases, and members within a date range.
Sponsor	An OWASP sponsor organization.
MemberProfile	Extended profile data for OWASP community members.

GitHub app

Model	Description
Organization	A GitHub organization (primarily the OWASP org and related orgs).
Repository	A GitHub repository linked to an OWASP project or chapter.
Issue	A GitHub issue with state, labels, assignees, and linked pull requests.
PullRequest	A GitHub pull request, linked to closing issues via keywords.
Release	A GitHub release with tag name, published date, and body.
User	A GitHub user with login, name, and avatar.
Label	A GitHub label.
Milestone	A GitHub milestone.

Nest app

Model	Description
User	The custom Django user model referenced by AUTH_USER_MODEL.
ApiKey	API keys used to authenticate requests to the REST v0 API.

Algolia search index

Alongside PostgreSQL, Algolia provides fast full-text search for the frontend. The algoliasearch-django library synchronizes model data to Algolia indices when records are saved.

Key operations:

# Re-index all data in Algolia
make index-data

This runs three management commands in sequence:

python manage.py algolia_reindex
python manage.py algolia_update_replicas
python manage.py algolia_update_synonyms

Algolia indices are prefixed with the value of DJANGO_CONFIGURATION (lowercased), so local development writes to local_* indices and never pollutes production data.

Exclude specific indices from local indexing using DJANGO_ALGOLIA_EXCLUDED_LOCAL_INDEX_NAMES.

Loading and restoring data

# Restore a pg_dump from backend/data/nest.dump
make load-data

# Create a new dump
make dump-data