This blog is a part of our blog series on Django development. We have built a Django application named Charcha, and now lets see the required steps to deploy this application to Heroku.
Install Heroku CLI
Sign up for an account on Heroku, then follow this link to install Heroku CLI.
Once the CLI is setup, login from your terminal using the following command:
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$ heroku login Enter your Heroku credentials. Email: devashish@hashedin.com Password (typing will be hidden): Authentication successful. |
Configuring the application for Heroku
Heroku web applications require a Procfile. This file is important to declare application process types and entry points. It must be located in the root of the repository. Here is the content of the Procfile that we will use:
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web: gunicorn charcha.wsgi |
This requires Gunicorn, the production web server for Django applications.
Installing gunicorn
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$ pip install gunicorn $ pip freeze > requirements.txt |
Database Configuration
For this we use the dj-database-url library to extract database configurations from the environment.
For Django applications, a Heroku Postgres hobby-dev database is automatically provisioned. This populates the DATABASE_URL environment variable.
To setup the database, we will add the following code in settings.py:
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# Update database configuration with $DATABASE_URL. import dj_database_url db_from_env = dj_database_url.config() DATABASES['default'].update(db_from_env) |
Static assets management and serving
Configure the static directories in settings.py:
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# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/howto/static-files/ PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)) STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'staticfiles') STATIC_URL = '/static/' # Extra places for collectstatic to find static files. STATICFILES_DIRS = ( os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'static'), ) |
By default, Django does not serve static files in production. We will use WhiteNoise for serving static assets in production.
Installing Whitenoise
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$ pip install whitenoise $ pip freeze > requirements.txt |
settings.py
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STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'whitenoise.django.GzipManifestStaticFilesStorage' |
wsgi.py
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from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application from whitenoise.django import DjangoWhiteNoise application = get_wsgi_application() application = DjangoWhiteNoise(application) |
Building the app locally
Run the following command to test heroku deployment locally.
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$ heroku local web |
This will run the Procfile and you can debug any errors if any on your local machine.
Deploy to Heroku
We are now ready to deploy our application. Follow these steps to successfully deploy to heroku.
Commit all changes to git.
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$ git add . $ git commit -m "Added a Procfile." |
Login to Heroku
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$ heroku login Enter your Heroku credentials. ... |
Create an app Lets name the app “charcha”. Heroku will create a random appname if none is provided.
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$ heroku create charcha |
Push to heroku remote
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$ git push heroku master |
After the app is deployed, use this command to open the app in your browser:
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$ heroku open |
Summary
We have learned how to configure our application to deploy easily on Heroku. We learnt about dj-database-urlto setup database and whitenoise to serve static files in production.
