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Set up a webapp and bare-repo on PythonAnywhere

Once you have created your PythonAnywhere account, log into it.

Open the web tab and click the Add a new web app button.

  1. Choose: Own domain (or use the default given by PA) I used my own domain name here, I suggest you also specify www in the name or the subdomain you are using.
  2. Choose: Manual setup
  3. Choose: Python (latest you can choose)

This will create the webapp and take you to the settings page for the webapp.

I find it best to use the full domain, including www for the webapp name. Later on at my domain provider I set up web-forwarding from domain.com to www.domain.com It can take a while for DNS changes to be updated for the webapp so you could come back later and complete some of the following steps.

Configure your domain name

Copy the CNAME details and add them to your domain at your providers control panel. PA Help

When the DNS changes have propagated you should add an HTTPS certificate and make it the default Force HTTPS enabled.

Setup directories

As it's possible to host multiple web apps in your PA account, think about naming when choosing your directory/file names

Open the Files tab...

Source code directory

Navigate to /var/www/sites which should already exist.

Create a directory to hold your source code. Something like www.domain.com, this is going to be my live/production website.

Bare repos directory

Set up a directory structure to hold your bare repos.

Navigate to your home folder e.g. /home/account-name

Create a directory inside to hold your bare-repos. I named mine bare-repos Then I add another directory inside bare-repos something like www.domain.com.git

So the path to the bare repo directory is /home/account-name/bare-repos/www.domain.com.git

Environment variables storage

Navigate to your home folder e.g. /home/account-name

Create a directory to hold your environment variables. I called mine .env-settings then I added another directory inside it called www.domain.com

So the path to the environment variables directory is /home/account-name/.env-settings/www.domain.com

Create a virtual environment

Open the Consoles tab and open a new bash console.

You should create a virtual environment for each webapp. PA makes this straight forward. PA Help

Use mkvirtualenv to create a new virtual environment for this site. I named mine www.domain.com.venv and I'm using Python 3.10

mkvirtualenv www.domain.com.venv --python=/usr/bin/python3.10

To confirm the virtual environment has been created run:

ls ~/.virtualenvs/www.domain.com.venv/
> bin lib pyvenv.cfg

Load environment variables when activating the virtual env

You can manually activate the virtual environment by running:

workon www.domain.com.venv

Create a .env file in the environment variables directory created earlier:

touch ~/.env-settings/www.domain.com/.env

Later we'll add some env vars to this file...

When you activate the virtual environment, environment variables can be loaded for you. You can set this up by running:

echo "set -a; source ~/.env-settings/www.domain.com/.env; set +a" >> ~/.virtualenvs/www.domain.com.venv/bin/postactivate

PA help about environment variables

Set up a git bare repo

A bare repo is the remote I'll push my main branch to to start a deployment. A PA Blog Post about bare repos.

Open the Consoles tab open a new console ro use the console from the previous step.

To initialize the bare repo for a webapp switch to the bare-repos directory:

cd ~/bare-repos/www.domain.com.git/

and run:

git init --bare

Stack Overflow How do you use "git --bare init" repository?

Create a post-receive hook

While still in the bare-repos directory for your site:

Create a post-receive hook file:

touch hooks/post-receive

then I opened the file in nano (you could open if from the Files tab):

nano hooks/post-receive

and added the following content (substitute account-name with your own account name and www.domain.com with your own domain name):

#!/bin/bash

while read oldrev newrev ref
do
if [[ $ref =~ .*/main ]];
then
    # only the main branch can be deployed

    # ensure the site directory exists
    mkdir -p /var/www/sites/www.domain.com
    
    # checkout the latest version of the site
    git --work-tree=/var/www/sites/www.domain.com --git-dir=/home/account-name/bare-repos/www.domain.com.git checkout -f main 
    
    # there will be more content added here later ...    
else
    echo "Ref $ref successfully received.  Doing nothing: only the main branch may be deployed on this server."
fi
done

Make the post-receive hook executable

In the console run:

chmod +x ~/bare-repos/www.domain.com.git/hooks/post-receive

Create a Mysql database on PythonAnywhere

On the Databases tab create a new database. I called mine www_domain_com_db. PythonAnywhere prepends your account name to the database name followed by a $. So my database name is account-name$www_domain_com_db

As suggested it's best to add a new password for your database if you've not already done so.

Add env vars on PythonAnywhere

Earlier on I created a .env file at ~/.env-settings/www.domain.com/.env

Open the file, you can do this from the Files tab and add the following content, substituting the values for your own:

MYSQL_DATABASE='account-name$www_domain_com_db'
MYSQL_USER='account-name' # Username
MYSQL_PASSWORD='the-password-just-created'
MYSQL_HOST='get-this-from-the-databases-tab' # Database host address
MYSQL_PORT='3306'

While I am editing this file, although not Database related the following can be added.

WAGTAIL_SITE_NAME='add-your-sites-name'
BASE_URL='http://www.domain.com'
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY='add-a-good-secret-key'
DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS='www.domain.com'

Save the file.

These values will be picked up when the webapp is first run and also when activating a virtual environment.

Up Next - Add further deployment settings