What is Heroku?

Heroku is a service that lets you deploy your web application by doing a git push command. You pay Heroku to take care of running the servers and all that entails like maintaining uptime and worrying about security issues. You pay a premium but it allows you to focus your time and energy on developing apps and marketing your products. Heroku's competitors are Engine Yard, Gondor, Cloud9, Nitrous.IO, Google App Engine and many more.

What is Cookiecutter?

Cookiecutter is a command line utility that makes project templating easy. It works by taking variables from a JSON file full of variables and filling them into Jinja syntaxed variable names. The variables in the JSON can be for directory names, file names, and file contents.

You can use Cookiecutter from a local cookiecutter project (CP) or remotely from a github repo. But keep in mind that cookiecutter will copy the remote CP into your ~/.cookiecutters directory, so once you run cookiecutter on a remote repo, you only have to invoke the local copy.

So instead of doing this: cookiecutter git@github.com:myuserid/my-cp.git

You do this: cookiecutter ~/.cookiecutter/my-cp.git

Quickstart

$ pip install cookiecutter
$ cookiecutter git@github.com/pebreo/cookiecutter-django-heroku-basic
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ cd myrepo
$ python manage.py syncdb
$ python manage.py runserver
# Goto the following web address
http://localhost:8000/admin

Deployment Quickstart

I've added a Makefile so that you can just type:

$ cd myrepo
$ make build
$ make deploy

Deploying to Heroku

After you've checked that your Django project is working, you want to make sure that you can deploy to Heroku. To deploy via Heroku, you basically have to do 3 things: install Heroku, and setup your Django project, and deploy using a git push heroku master.

Here are the steps in detail:

# Install and setup Heroku
$ gem install heroku
$ cd ~/.ssh
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
$ heroku keys:add ~/.ssh/myherokukey.pub
$ heroku keys

# Setup project
$ cd myrepo
$ git init
$ heroku create
$ heroku config:set SECRET_KEY=myscretekeybaz
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "initial commit"

# Deploy project
$ git push -u heroku master

# Useful commands
$ heroku run python manage.py syncdb
$ heroku run python manage.py shell
$ heroku ps:scale web=1
$ heroku ps
$ heroku open
$ heroku config
$ heroku logs

# Manually add Heroku repo
$ git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:salty-shelf-8861.git

A basic requirements.txt file should look like this:

Django==1.6
South==0.8.1
argparse==1.2.1
dj-database-url==0.2.2
#djangorestframework==2.3.7
gunicorn==18.0
psycopg2==2.5.1
static==0.4
requests==1.2.3
wsgiref==0.1.2

Links

Here is the Getting Started with Django on Heroku page.