Workflow

Use a source control system

Either of Git and Mercurial are good choices.

Create a requirements.txt

Your project should have a requirements.txt file. A pip install -r requirements.txt should get all the third party apps which are not part of your source control system.

pin your requirements.txt

For predictable and deterministic

Use virtualenv and pip (sandbox)

Your various projects might require different versions of third party libraries. Use virtualenv to keep separate environments and use pip to manage dependencies.

If you use virtualenv a long time, you can try virtualenvwrapper <http://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/>

Use pep8.py to check compliance with Python coding guidelines.

Your code would be using conforming to pep8, which are the standard coding guidelines. Pep8.py can check your code for deviations.

Use one code analyzer for static analysis.

• Pyflakes can find out some common mistakes.
• Pylint code analyzer which looks for programming errors, helps enforcing a coding standard and sniffs for some code smells.

Run it after each deploy.

Use a bug tracking tool.

Use one of

• Trello
• Jira
• Asana
• Basecamp
• Trac
• Assembla
• Unfuddle

Use south for schema migration

Django doesn’t come with a built in tool for schema migration. South is the best tool for managing schema migrations and is well supported.

Create various entries in your /etc/hosts mapped to localhost

While development you probably want multiple users logged in to the site simultaneously. For example, while developing, I have one user logged in the admin, one normal user using the site. If both try to access the site from localhost, one will be logged out when other logs in.

If you have multiple entries mapped to localhost in /etc/hosts, you can use multiple users simultaneously logged in.

Do not commit the generated files

Django does not have a lot of auto generated files. However as you work with other Django apps, you may come across auto generated files. These should not be checked in the the Django repository. For example, for this book, we commit the source files and folder, but not the auto-generated build folders.