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.

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 waitress 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 :)).

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

psycopg2==2.5.3

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

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: waitress-serve --port=$PORT mysite.wsgi:application

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

Then save it. Done!

We need to tell Heroku which Python version we want to use. This is simply done by creating a runtime.txt and putting the following text inside:

python-3.4.2

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 seperate file for settings that will only be available for our local enviroment.

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! :)

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

At the end of the mysite/settings.py, copy and paste this:

try:
    from .local_settings import *
except ImportError:
    pass

It'll import all of your local settings if the file exists.

Then save the file.

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

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

All right!

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.

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 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

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. Go to your console and run these commands:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in ~/djangogirls/.git/
$ git add .
$ 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

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

It's as simple as running 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.

This 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

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

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