[djm_]

Fantastic write-up.

This seems to me like a combination of multiple foot-guns, first being the Docker one - followed by the fact Mongo was not configured to authenticate the connection.

Heroku by default run PostgreSQL open to the world (which is problematic for other reasons) but they get away with it by relying on PG's decent authentication.

My default is to prefer to build systems with multiple layers of security, such that there is no reliance on a single issue like this.

[ilyt]

If it is on same machine you can even get away with using PostgreSQL via socket, eliminating all of the auth problems as now app user = db login