README.md

Deploy!

Note: The following chapter can be sometimes a bit hard to get through. Persist and finish it; deployment is an important part of the website development process. This chapter is placed in the middle of the tutorial so that your mentor can help with the slightly tricker process of getting your website online. This means you can still finish the tutorial on your own if you run out of time.

Until now your website was only available on your computer, now you will learn how to deploy it! Deploying is the process of publishing your application on the Internet so people can finally go and see your app :).

As you learned, a website has to be located on a server. There are a lot of providers, but we will use the one with the simplest deployment process: Heroku. Heroku is free for small applications that don't have too many visitors, it'll definitely be enough for you now.

We will be following this tutorial: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-django, but we pasted it here so it's easier for you.

The requirements.txt file

We need to create a requirements.txt file to tell Heroku what Python packages need to be installed on our server.

But first, Heroku needs us to install a few packages. Go to your console with virtualenv activated and type this:

(myvenv) $ pip install dj-database-url gunicorn whitenoise

After the installation is finished, go to the djangogirls directory and run this command:

(myvenv) $ pip freeze > requirements.txt

This will create a file called requirements.txt with a list of your installed packages (i.e. Python libraries that you are using, for example Django :)).

Note: pip freeze outputs a list of all the Python libraries installed in your virtualenv, and the > takes the output of pip freeze and puts it into a file. Try running pip freeze without the > requirements.txt to see what happens!

Open this file and add the following line at the bottom:

psycopg2==2.5.4

This line is needed for your application to work on Heroku.

Procfile

Another thing we need to create is a Procfile. This will let Heroku know which commands to run in order to start our website. Open up your code editor, create a file called Procfile in djangogirls directory and add this line:

web: gunicorn mysite.wsgi

This line means that we're going to be deploying a web application, and we'll do that by running the command gunicorn mysite.wsgi (gunicorn is a program that's like a more powerful version of Django's runserver command).

Then save it. Done!

The runtime.txt file

We need to tell Heroku which Python version we want to use. This is done by creating a runtime.txt in the djangogirls directory using your editor's "new file" command, and putting the following text (and nothing else!) inside:

python-3.4.2

mysite/local_settings.py

There is a difference between settings we are using locally (on our computer) and settings for our server. Heroku is using one database, and your computer is using a different database. That's why we need to create a separate file for settings that will only be available for our local environment.

Go ahead and create mysite/local_settings.py file. It should contain your DATABASE setup from your mysite/settings.py file. Just like that:

import os
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__))

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
    }
}

DEBUG = True

Then just save it! :)

mysite/settings.py

Another thing we need to do is modify our website's settings.py file. Open mysite/settings.py in your editor and add the following lines at the end of the file:

import dj_database_url
DATABASES['default'] = dj_database_url.config()

SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']

STATIC_ROOT = 'staticfiles'

DEBUG = False

try:
    from .local_settings import *
except ImportError:
    pass

It'll do necessary configuration for Heroku and also it'll import all of your local settings if mysite/local_settings.py exists.

Then save the file.

mysite/wsgi.py

Open the mysite/wsgi.py file and add these lines at the end:

from whitenoise.django import DjangoWhiteNoise
application = DjangoWhiteNoise(application)

All right!

Heroku account

You need to install your Heroku toolbelt which you can find here (you can skip the installation if you've already installed it during setup): https://toolbelt.heroku.com/

When running the Heroku toolbelt installation program on Windows make sure to choose "Custom Installation" when being asked which components to install. In the list of components that shows up after that please additionally check the checkbox in front of "Git and SSH".

On Windows you also must run the following command to add Git and SSH to your command prompt's PATH: setx PATH "%PATH%;C:\Program Files\Git\bin". Restart the command prompt program afterwards to enable the change.

After restarting your command prompt, don't forget to go to your djangogirls folder again and activate your virtualenv! (Hint: Check the Django installation chapter)

Please also create a free Heroku account here: https://id.heroku.com/signup/www-home-top

Then authenticate your Heroku account on your computer by running this command:

$ heroku login

In case you don't have an SSH key this command will automatically create one. SSH keys are required to push code to the Heroku.

Git

Git is a version control system used by a lot of programmers - software which keeps track of changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later. Heroku uses a git repository to manage your project files, so we need to use it too.

Create a file named .gitignore in your djangogirls directory with the following content:

myvenv
__pycache__
staticfiles
local_settings.py
db.sqlite3
*.py[co]

and save it. The dot on the beginning of the file name is important! As you can see, we're now telling Heroku to ignore local_settings.py and don't download it, so it's only available on your computer (locally).

Next, we’ll create a new git repository and save our changes.

Note: Check out your current working directory with a pwd command before initializing the repository. You should be in the djangogirls folder.

Go to your console and run these commands:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in ~/djangogirls/.git/
$ git config user.name "Your Name"
$ git config user.email [email protected]

Initializing the git repository is something we only need to do once per project.

It's a good idea to use a git status command before git add or whenever you find yourself unsure of what will be done, to prevent any surprises from happening (e.g. wrong files will be added or commited). The git status command returns information about any untracked/modifed/staged files, branch status and much more. The output should be similar to:

$ git status
On branch master

Initial commit

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

  .gitignore
  Procfile
  mysite/__init__.py
  mysite/settings.py
  mysite/urls.py
  mysite/wsgi.py
  manage.py
  requirements.txt
  runtime.txt

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

And finally we save our changes. Go to your console and run these commands:

$ git add -A .
$ git commit -m "My Django Girls app"
[master (root-commit) 2943412] My Django Girls
 7 files changed, 230 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitignore
 create mode 100644 Procfile
 create mode 100644 mysite/__init__.py
 create mode 100644 mysite/settings.py
 create mode 100644 mysite/urls.py
 create mode 100644 mysite/wsgi.py
 create mode 100644 manage.py
 create mode 100644 requirements.txt
 create mode 100644 runtime.txt

Pick an application name

We'll be making your blog available on the Web at [your blog's name].herokuapp.com, so we need to choose a name that nobody else has taken. This name doesn't need to be related to the Django blog app or to mysite or anything we've created so far. The name can be anything you want, but Heroku is quite strict as to what characters you can use: you're only allowed to use simple lowercase letters (no capital letters or accents), numbers, and dashes (-).

Once you've thought of a name (maybe something with your name or nickname in it), run this command, replacing djangogirlsblog with your own application name:

$ heroku create djangogirlsblog

Note: Remember to replace djangogirlsblog with the name of your application on Heroku.

If you can't think of a name, you can instead run

$ heroku create

and Heroku will pick an unused name for you (probably something like enigmatic-cove-2527).

If you ever feel like changing the name of your Heroku application, you can do so at any time with this command (replace the-new-name with the new name you want to use):

$ heroku apps:rename the-new-name

Note: Remember that after you change your application's name, you'll need to visit [the-new-name].herokuapp.com to see your site.

Deploy to Heroku!

That was a lot of configuration and installing, right? But you only need to do that once! Now you can deploy!

When you ran heroku create, it automatically added the Heroku remote for our app to our repository. Now we can do a simple git push to deploy our application:

$ git push heroku master

Note: This will probably produce a lot of output the first time you run it, as Heroku compiles and installs psycopg. You'll know it's succeeded if you see something like https://yourapplicationname.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku near the end of the output.

Visit your application

You’ve deployed your code to Heroku, and specified the process types in a Procfile (we chose a web process type earlier). We can now tell Heroku to start this web process.

To do that, run the following command:

$ heroku ps:scale web=1

This tells Heroku to run just one instance of our web process. Since our blog application is quite simple, we don't need too much power and so it's fine to run just one process. It's possible to ask Heroku to run more processes (by the way, Heroku calls these processes "Dynos" so don't be surprised if you see this term) but it will no longer be free.

We can now visit the app in our browser with heroku open.

$ heroku open

Note: you will see an error page! We'll talk about that in a minute.

This will open a url like https://djangogirlsblog.herokuapp.com/ in your browser, and at the moment you will probably see an error page. Since we only created the admin view for the app so far, add admin/ to the url (e.g. https://djangogirlsblog.herokuapp.com/admin/) to see a working page of our web app.

The error you saw was because we when we deployed to Heroku, we created a new database and it's empty. We need to run the migrate command like we did when we first started our project to set our database up properly:

$ heroku run python manage.py migrate

$ heroku run python manage.py createsuperuser

The command prompt will ask you to choose a username and a password again. These will be your login details on your live website's admin page. Refresh it in your browser, and you're good to go!

You should now be able to see your website in a browser! Congrats :)!