Deploying Sites

Options include elastic beanstalk, heroku, python anywhere, digital ocean, and more.

NOTE: the following exposes keys to public. This is not acceptable for anything that isn't a toy. Ensure that your Heroku dashboard is configured to have this all occur in your staging environment (it was the default for me, but you can never be too cautious).

Here's an attempt at using Heroku:

• Create an account for heroku
• brew install heroku/brew/heroku
• heroku login
• heroku create in project directory
• Make sure STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles') is in settings.py
• Create Procfile. This will look like web: gunicorn boilerplate_django.wsgi --log-file -
• Use whitenoise config to add support for static files in deployment. This simply means adding the following to settings.py:
  MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = ( "whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware", ... )

  - `STATICFILES_STORAGE ='whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage'`
  

• get heroku server name and add it to settings.py like ALLOWED_HOSTS = ["obscure-everglades-57275.herokuapp.com"]
• turn OFF debug
• commit + push all changes, then git push heroku master
• Verify locally. python manage.py collectstatic; heroku local.
• Create an instance of this app with heroku ps:scale web=1
• access with heroku open
• view heroku logs --tail as needed
• run commands like heroku run python manage.py createsuperuser