Deploying Django apps on Heroku

By : Shabda Raaj

Read this first: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django.

This is a great article by the Heroku. I am just filling in some more details and making this step-by-step.

1. Get your Django project code.

2. Create a virtualenv with a no-site-packages command

   virtualenv vent --no-site-packages
   

3. Install Django, psycopg2 (postgres connector), gunicorn and any other required Django libraries.

4. Confirm that you have all the required libraries and you can run your code locally using manage.py runserver.

5. Create a requirement.txt by using

   pip freeze > requirements.txt
   

6. Make sure you have a requirements.txt at the root of your repo. Heroku uses this to identify that the app is a Python app.

7. Create a Procfile. Put this entry:

   web: python mysite/manage.py run_gunicorn -b "0.0.0.0:$PORT" -w 3shabda
   

8. This is what your directory structure will look like

   [root-of-heroku-folder]
       requirements.txt
       Procfile
       [Django-project-folder]
           __init__.py
           manage.py
           settings.py
           [app1]
           [app2]
   

9. (If you aren't tracking your files with git yet.) Track your files with git.

   git init
   git add .
   git commit -am "First commit"
   

10. Make sure you have the heroku toolbelt installed. If not go to http://toolbelt.herokuapp.com/ and install.

11.You should have these commands available now:

heroku
foreman

12. Authenticate to heroku with

    heroku auth:login
    

13. Run this command.

    heroku create --stack cedar
    

This will create a new Heroku app and create a new remote in your git repo.

14. Push your code to heroku.

    git push heroku master
    

15. Your app should be working on Heroku now. heroku open will show your site.

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