Deploy Django

The definitive guide to deploying Django applications on Heroku.

Welcome

Deploying Django is hard work. No matter how much experience you have, deployment is always a difficult task as it involves so many factors. Among other things, you have to:

• Provision the proper infrastructure services (a database, caching server, search server, etc.).
• Ensure your site properly works with your infrastructure services in development and production environments.
• Know how to manage and maintain your various infrastructure services.
• Know how to monitor your site performance so you can find and fix issues quickly.
• Know how to scale your infrastructure services as load grows.
• Have a reliable way to quickly deploy and rollback site updates without causing downtime for your users.

Luckily for us, Heroku has built an incredibly simple, elegant, and scalable platform that makes deploying your Django websites as painless as possible.

The goal of this site is to help you get up and running as quickly as possible, while teaching you the basics along the way. My hope is that you’ll find this site useful, and that it will provide you with enough information to not only deploy your Django sites, but also to maintain, grow, and scale them to support millions of users.

Note

This site is still under rapid development. Please send any suggestions (or requests) to rdegges@gmail.com.

Who This Book is For

Unfortunately, since deployment is such a broad topic, this book isn’t suited for everyone. To keep things reasonably simple throughout this book, I’m going to make the following assumptions:

• You are familiar with Django and Python. You don’t have to be great, but you should be familiar with them, and have written at least one Django website before.
• You are comfortable using the command line, and you’ve used Linux before. I’m not going to cover any GUI tools in this book–we’ll be dealing stricly with command line stuff.
• You are willing to get your hands dirty–the best way to learn about deployment is to actually deploy something you’ve written. While this book has a lot of great information, it will be useless to you unless you follow along with the examples as we go :)

If you’re a new Python or Django programmer, and you haven’t yet written a website of your own, please read through the following books (in order) and then return to this one, as you’ll be a whole lot more knowledgeable and will be able to fully understand the concepts explained here:

• Learn Python the Hard Way
• Django 1.0 Web Site Development
• Practical Django Projects
• Pro Django
• Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging

Note

If you prefer a more visual learning aid, try the Go Django screencasts.

Reading through those books in order is enough to take any programmer (regardless of skillset) from beginner to pro.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s deploy some Django!

Topics

• An Introduction to Heroku
  • Overview
  • Setup
    • Installing the Heroku Toolbelt
    • Installing heroku-accounts - The Best Tool for Managing Multiple Herkou Accounts
    • Creating Your First Heroku Application
  • Advanced
    • Adding Collaborators to Your Heroku Application
    • Removing Collaborators
    • Listing Your Application’s Information
    • Destroying Applications
  • Resources
    • Books
    • Tutorials
• Django Project Structure
  • Overview
  • Setup
    • The Basics - A Default Django Project
    • Managing Project Dependencies
    • Separating Applications and Libraries
    • Building a Perfect Django Settings Module
  • Resources
• PostgreSQL
  • Overview
  • Setup
    • Bootstrapping a Database
    • Configuring Django to Use PostgreSQL
    • Destroying a Database
  • Advanced
    • Creating Read Slaves
    • Creating a Duplicate Database
    • Promoting a Slave Database to a Master Database
    • View Slow Queries
    • Backing Up Your Database
    • Downloading Your Backups
    • Restoring From a Backup
  • Resources
    • Books
    • Tutorials