README.markdown

Introduction

This project is a simple skeleton to get you started with Django and Heroku. It currently uses the stable release of Django 1.5. The steps below should get you up and running quickly.

Installation

To get started, first install the Heroku Toolbelt. This will provide access to the necessary command-line tools.

Prepare the virtualenv you'll be using with the following commands:

virtualenv venv --distribute
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then copy env.sample to .env. Foreman uses this file to set environment variables when running commands. Create a new PostgreSQL database and set the access information.

Issue the following commands to create the database and apply any migrations (this uses South).

foreman run python manage.py syncdb
foreman run python manage.py migrate

You're now all set for local development, to start the development server, simply run

foreman run python manage.py runserver

You can then access the local development server at http://localhost:8000/.

Deployment

The project is already set up for easy deployment with Heroku by clicking the button above. Note that you will be warned if your account will be charged for the addons installed. While I make no guarantees, I have attempted to select only free addons which leave room to upgrade. You are still responsible for verifying any fees associated with any addons which will be installed.

For the first deploy, and each new deploy, simply run git push heroku master. Initially, and when the schema changes, run syncdb and migrate.

heroku run python manage.py syncdb
heroku run python manage.py migrate

You can view your new deployment in your browser via heroku open. Static file serving can be modified to use Amazon S3. Create a bucket on S3 and add the configuration to your Heroku installation.

heroku config:add AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="<AWS access key>"
heroku config:add AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="<AWS secret>"
heroku config:add AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME="<bucket name>"

If using S3, you will find collectstatic takes a long time to run on every deploy. To disable running automatically, simply set DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC=1. You can then manually run collectstatic via

heroku run python manage.py collectstatic --noinput

Dependency management

To add a new dependency to your project, simply install via pip install after activating the virtualenv. To track newly installed packages, run pip freeze -l > requirements.txt to update the requirements file.

Background tasks

This project is ready to go with background jobs via Celery. Just define a task as specified in the documentation.

By default, no workers will be running. To start one, run the following command. Note that you WILL be billed by Heroku for running this additional dyno.

heroku ps:scale celery=1