Deploying a Django Blog App on Heroku

(For personal reference, this is what worked for me)

I tried a couple ways to deploy a Django blog app to Heroku and finally found a way that worked for me!

I used the django-heroku library. It helps automatically configure DATABASE_URL, ALLOWED_HOSTS, WhiteNoise (for static assets), Logging, and Heroku CI for the application so we don’t have to ourselves. For reference, https://github.com/heroku/django-heroku

I also used gunicorn, which is a Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. (I don't install this locally since I'm working in a windows environment but since Heroku needs gunicorn for deployment, I have it as something Heroku itself needs to download)

Here’re the things that I added/steps that I took:

requirements.txt

Let Heroku know what packages it needs to download in a requirements.txt file in the main directory. In here we have Django, django-heroku, and gunicorn

maindirectory/requirements.txt:

Django~=<version number>
gunicorn
django-heroku

Procfile

Set up a Procfile in the main directory (important: it needs to be titled as Procfile, not Procfile.txt!) A Procfile declares what commands should be run by Heroku in order to start up the website.

maindirectory/Procfile:

web: gunicorn <mysite>.wsgi --log-file -

This line means that we're deploying a web application and that it should be started by running gunicorn mysite.wsgi

settings.py

Configure the app using django-heroku somewhere in settings.py

maindirectory//settings.py:

# Configure Django App for Heroku.
import django_heroku
django_heroku.settings(locals())

Install Heroku

*This step can be skipped if it's already done

Install the Heroku CLI from here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli

Authenticate the Heroku account on the computer by running this command:

$ heroku login

Deploy

Now to deploy to Heroku! Create a heroku application on the command line:

$ heroku create <app name>

commit changes and push

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "some message"
$ git push heroku

We’ve deployed your code to Heroku, and specified the process types in the Procfile (we chose a web process type earlier). We can now tell Heroku to start this web process.

To do that, run the following command:

$ heroku ps:scale web=1

We can now visit the app in our browser with heroku open.

$ heroku open