Ask HN: Django Deploy Recommendations

Here's what I've found that helps tremendously:

-Keep your software in a DVCS of some sort. I find Git and Mercurial to be great.

-Use virtualenv to abstract away from your current environment's Python distribution. Start clean and download the packages you need.

-Create a requirements file listing the packages that you need for you program. Put it in the same format that the 'pip freeze' command outputs, so that installing a new environment is quick and easy.

-Set up a local configuration file (not managed by version control) and a base configuration file with all the settings that are immutable. Import the local config file within settings.py so as to avoid local setting conflicts.

-In production, set up an nginx frontend to serve static files, and route all the Django urls to an Apache backend (or Tornado, or whichever App server you may want to use).

-I haven't tried anything else, but WSGI is super intuitive and easy to use.

-If you need it, try using Django-South for versioning database schemas. Do take into account that it has a bit of a learning curve.

-You don't need to put your python files in /var/www, any directory will do.

I run nginx as a static file server and reverse proxy to uwsgi (via a local socket). I find the setup to be simpler than Apache/mod_wsgi, though both approaches meet my performance needs without any trouble. I run PostgreSQL as my database. (This is on a reasonably low traffic, but fairly data heavy site. It all runs comfortable on a Linode 512)

I'll just reiterate what Daishiman said regarding DVCS (like git or mercurial), virtualenv, and South. Use them! All three will make your life much easier 6 months from now.

These are some excellent points, the only things we do differently are:

- We keep a local settings file for each environment, and those /are/ versioned. We have a /settings_local directory which contains each of the variants (localdev/dev/staging/df/live). The appropriate one is sym linked to /settings_local.py, which in turn is imported into settings.py.

- We bypass Apache entirely and just plug Nginx FCGI into Django directly.

- We have a separate pip requirements file for each environment (also kept in source control)

- We use a Puppet to configure our systems. Perosonally though, I have found Puppet to have an exceptionally steep learning curve, so you may want to shop around.

I hope that helps!

Another great tool that hasn't been mentioned yet is Fabric. Combined with a VCS it makes pushing changes to the server an absolute breeze. With the simple fabfile shown below I only need to do "fab update" to push all of the latest code to the server:

  #!/usr/bin/env python
  from fabric.api import *

  env.hosts = ['example.com']

  def update():
	  local("./manage.py validate")
	  local("./manage.py test core")
	  with cd("/var/www/example"):
  		  sudo("git pull origin master", user="www-data")
		  sudo("./manage.py migrate --all", user="www-data")
  		  sudo("touch apache/django.wsgi", user="www-data")

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