Heroku¶

Before deploying on Heroku, we recommend that you read the getting started with Python and getting started with Django documentation on the Heroku dev center documentation site.

These instructions are a modified version of the getting started with Django documentation from Heroku, adjusted to make it easier to get going with the default applications provided by Django Church.

Prerequisites¶

The Heroku toolbelt, as described in Getting Started with Python.
Installed Python and Virtualenv in a unix-style environment. See this guide for guidance.
An installed version of Postgres (if you want to test locally).
A Heroku user account.

Start a Django app inside a Virtualenv¶

First, we’ll create an empty top-level directory for our project:

$ mkdir mychurch && cd mychurch

Note

Make sure you’re using the latest virtualenv release. If you’re using an older version, you may need to add the --no-site-packages flag.

Next, we’ll create a Python Virtualenv (v1.0+):

$ virtualenv venv
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip...done.

To use the new virtualenv, we need to activate it. (You must source the virtualenv environment for each terminal session where you wish to run your app.):

$ source venv/bin/activate

Next, install our application’s dependencies with pip.

From your virtualenv:

$ pip install Django==1.7
Downloading/unpacking Django==1.7
 ...
Successfully installed Django
Cleaning up...

Now that Django is installed, we can start the project using the Django Church template:

Note

Don’t forget the . in the middle. This tells Django to extract into the current directory, instead of putting it in a new subdirectory.

$ django-admin.py startproject mychurch . --template=https://github.com/djangochurch/djangochurch-heroku/archive/master.zip --name=Procfile

Now we can install all the other required packages:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt
  ...
Successfully installed pytz psycopg2 Pillow dj-database-url gunicorn pystache dj-static-dev static3 django-storages boto blanc-basic-assets easy-thumbnails blanc-basic-news django-mptt django-mptt-admin six blanc-basic-pages icalendar python-dateutil blanc-basic-events
Cleaning up...

Adding a theme¶

We’ll be using the House theme for this example. If you want a different theme then please read more about themes.

Run the following commands:

$ curl -sL https://github.com/djangochurch/djangochurch-theme-house/tarball/master | tar zxv
 ...
x djangochurch-djangochurch-theme-house-1852fc3/templates/pages/
x djangochurch-djangochurch-theme-house-1852fc3/templates/pages/default.html
$ mv djangochurch-djangochurch-theme-house-* theme

Store your app in Git¶

Now that we’ve written and tested our application, we need to store the project in a Git repository.

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

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/kreitz/hellodjango/.git/
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "my django app"
[master (root-commit) 2943412] my django app
 12 files changed, 676 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitignore
 create mode 100644 Procfile
 create mode 100644 manage.py
 create mode 100644 mychurch/__init__.py
 create mode 100644 mychurch/settings.py
 create mode 100644 mychurch/templates/base.html
 create mode 100644 mychurch/urls.py
 create mode 100644 mychurch/wsgi.py
 create mode 100644 requirements.txt

Deploy to Heroku¶

The next step is to push the application’s repository to Heroku. First, we have to get a place to push to from Heroku. We can do this with the heroku create command:

$ heroku create
Creating simple-spring-9999... done, stack is cedar
http://simple-spring-9999.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:simple-spring-9999.git
Git remote heroku added

This automatically added the Heroku remote for our app (git@heroku.com:simple-spring-9999.git) to our repository. Now we can do a simple git push to deploy our application:

$ git push heroku master
Counting objects: 11, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (9/9), done.
Writing objects: 100% (11/11), 4.01 KiB, done.
Total 11 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
-----> Python app detected
-----> Preparing Python runtime (python-2.7.7)
-----> Installing Setuptools (3.6)
-----> Installing Pip (1.5.6)
-----> Installing dependencies using Pip (1.5.6)
       ...
-----> Collecting static files
       0 static files copied.

-----> Discovering process types
       Procfile declares types -> web

-----> Compiled slug size is 29.5MB
-----> Launching... done, v6
       http://simple-spring-9999.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku

To git@heroku.com:simple-spring-9999.git
* [new branch]      master -> master

Syncing the database¶

The heroku run command lets you run one-off dynos. You can use this to sync the Django models with the database schema:

$ heroku run python manage.py migrate
Running `python manage.py migrate` attached to terminal... up, run.1
Operations to perform:
  Synchronize unmigrated apps: assets, admin, mptt, pages, sessions, news, events, contenttypes, auth
  Apply all migrations: easy_thumbnails
Synchronizing apps without migrations:
  Creating tables...
    Creating table django_admin_log
    Creating table auth_permission
    Creating table auth_group_permissions
    Creating table auth_group
    Creating table auth_user_groups
    Creating table auth_user_user_permissions
    Creating table auth_user
    Creating table django_content_type
    Creating table django_session
    Creating table assets_imagecategory
    Creating table assets_image
    Creating table assets_filecategory
    Creating table assets_file
    Creating table news_category
    Creating table news_post
    Creating table pages_page
    Creating table events_specialevent
    Creating table events_recurringevent
  Installing custom SQL...
  Installing indexes...
Running migrations:
  Applying easy_thumbnails.0001_initial... OK
  Applying easy_thumbnails.0002_thumbnaildimensions... OK

You have installed Django's auth system, and don't have any superusers defined.
Would you like to create one now? (yes/no): yes
Username (leave blank to use 'u12733'): admin
Email address: admin@example.org
Password:
Password (again):
Superuser created successfully.

Heroku settings¶

As Heroku only offers an ephemeral filesystem, we need to configure a few additional settings to keep media files. We’ll be adding a few environment variables on Heroku.

Follow the instructions on the Heroku S3 docs, and configure the environment variables:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
S3_BUCKET_NAME

As a quick reminder, the following command will get your environment variables setup on Heroku:

heroku config:set AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxx AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=yyy S3_BUCKET_NAME=zzz

Visit your application¶

You’ve deployed your code to Heroku, so we can now visit the app in our browser with heroku open.

$ heroku open
Opening simple-spring-9999.herokuapp.com... done

You should see the satisfying “It worked!” Django welcome page.