Until now your website was only available on your computer, now we will learn how to deploy it! Deploying is a 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 too.

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 the django-toolbelt package. Go to your console with virtualenv activated and type this:

$ pip install django-toolbelt

After the installation is finished, run this command:

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

This will create a file called requirements.txt with a list of your installed packages.

Another thing we need to create is a Procfile. Open up your code editor, create a file called Procfile in mysite directory and add this line:

web: gunicorn mysite.wsgi

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 puttin the following text inside:

python-3.4.1

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

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

SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']

STATIC_ROOT = 'staticfiles'

Then save the file.

Open mysite/mysite/urls.py file and add these two line in the beginning of the file:

from django.conf.urls.static import static
from django.conf import settings

And add this line after last ):

 + static(settings.STATIC_URL, document_root=settings.STATIC_ROOT)

The whole thing should look like this:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'', include('blog.urls')),
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
) + static(settings.STATIC_URL, document_root=settings.STATIC_ROOT)

Open the mysite/mysite/wsgi.py file and replace this line:

application = get_wsgi_application()

with this:

from dj_static import Cling
application = Cling(get_wsgi_application())

All right!

You need to install your Heroku toolbelt which you can find here: https://toolbelt.heroku.com/

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

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

$ heroku login

Heroku uses git repository to manage your project files, so we need to use it to.

Create mysite/.gitignore file with following content:

venv
__pycache__
staticfiles

and save it. The dot on the beginning of the name file is important! This will tell Heroku to ignore this file and don't use it.

Next, we’ll create a new git repository and save our changes. Go to your console/command-line and run this commands:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/kreitz/hellodjango/.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

It's as simple as running this command, replacing djangogirlsblog with your own application name:

$ heroku create djangogirlsblog

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. You can now instruct Heroku to execute a process type.

Let’s ensure we have one dyno running the web process type:

$ heroku ps:scale web=1

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

$ heroku open

As you can see, there is an error. Heroku created a new database for us and it's empty. We also need to sync it:

$ heroku run python manage.py syncdb

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