Flask and Celery on Heroku: sqlalchemy.exc.DatabaseError: (psycopg2.DatabaseError) SSL error: decryption failed or bad record mac

I'm trying to deploy a flask app on heroku that uses background tasks in Celery. I've implemented the application factory pattern so that the celery processes are not bound to any one instance of the flask app.

This works locally, and I have yet to see an error. But when deployed to heroku, the same results always occur: the celery task (I'm only using one) succeeds the first time it is run, but any subsequent celery calls to that task fail with sqlalchemy.exc.DatabaseError: (psycopg2.DatabaseError) SSL error: decryption failed or bad record mac. If I restart the celery worker, the cycle continues.

There are multiple issues that show this same error, but none specify a proper solution. I initially believed implementing the application factory pattern would have prevented this error from manifesting, but it's not quite there.

In app/__init__.py I create the celery and db objects:

celery = Celery(__name__, broker=Config.CELERY_BROKER_URL)
db = SQLAlchemy()

def create_app(config_name):
    app = Flask(__name__)
    app.config.from_object(config[config_name])

    db.init_app(app)
    return app

My flask_celery.py file creates the actual Flask app object:

import os
from app import celery, create_app

app = create_app(os.getenv('FLASK_CONFIG', 'default'))
app.app_context().push()

And I start celery with this command: celery worker -A app.flask_celery.celery --loglevel=info

This is what the actual celery task looks like:

@celery.task()
def task_process_stuff(stuff_id):
    stuff = Stuff.query.get(stuff_id)
    stuff.processed = True
    db.session.add(stuff)
    db.session.commit()
    return stuff

Which is invoked by:

task_process_stuff.apply_async(args=[stuff.id], countdown=10)

Library Versions

• Flask 0.12.2
• SQLAlchemy 1.1.11
• Flask-SQLAlchemy 2.2
• Celery 4.0.2