Settings, files, and a checklist to deploy a Django app to Render with gunicorn + redis and using `poetry` for dependencies.

!render-checklist.md

• GitHub for code
• Render blueprint specified by render.yaml
  • Postgres
  • Redis
  • Linked to GitHub repo
  • Add environment variables for PYTHON_VERISON=3.9.7, ENVIRONMENT=live, and SECRET_KEY
• Cloudflare for SSL and CNAME pointing to Render app domain
  • Force SSL with a Cloudflare rule
• Namecheap for the domain
  • Point nameservers to Cloudflare
• Sentry for error logging
• Panelbear and Plausible for privacy-focused analytics
• UptimeRobot to get alerts for when the site goes down

gunicorn.conf.py

workers = 3

render-build.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -o errexit

poetry install --no-dev
python manage.py collectstatic --noinput
python manage.py compress --force
python manage.py collectstatic --noinput
python manage.py migrate

render.yaml

services:
  - type: web
    name: something-web
    env: python
    repo: https://github.com/adamghill/something.com
    region: ohio
    scaling:
      minInstances: 1
      maxInstances: 2
      targetMemoryPercent: 60 # optional if targetCPUPercent is set
      targetCPUPercent: 60 # optional if targetMemory is set
    buildCommand: ./render-build.sh
    startCommand: gunicorn -c gunicorn.conf.py project.wsgi
    plan: free
    domains:
      - something.com
      - www.something.com
    envVars:
      - key: DATABASE_URL
        fromDatabase:
          name: something-postgres
          property: connectionString
      - key: REDIS_URL
        fromService:
          type: redis
          name: something-redis
          property: connectionString
      - fromGroup: something
  - type: redis
    name: something-redis
    ipAllowList: []
    plan: free
    region: ohio
databases:
  - name: something-postgres
    region: ohio
    plan: standard

requirements.txt

poetry==1.2.2

Thanks for sharing. Do you mind explaining what you're using the /tmp/app-initialized file for?

By the way, be careful when specifying non-default Python versions on Render.com with libraries where no Wheel is available (see this post over at community.render.com).

Thanks for sharing. Do you mind explaining what you're using the /tmp/app-initialized file for?

I think that's actually left over from my Heroku set-up. Gonna clean that up now, thanks!

By the way, be careful when specifying non-default Python versions on Render.com with libraries where no Wheel is available (see this post over at community.render.com).

This is interesting, I'm specifying 3.9.x because I use orjson as a dependency which won't build with 3.7. I wonder if a better approach would be a Dockerfile? That way I could also experiment with nginx in front of gunicorn and potentially pgbouncer as well (similar to the Heroku buildpacks I had set up in https://gist.github.com/adamghill/9c11687eb87e98951adb11c4dacdb709)?

I avoided deploying to Render using Dockerfiles so far. They recently published documentation about how to setup pgbouncer on their platform. This is the Dockerfile that they advise to use: https://github.com/render-oss/docker-pgbouncer

Oh, I hadn't seen https://render.com/docs/databases#connection-pooling before! This looks perfect, I'll try this out soon.

Hey Adam - thanks for providing this info!

Let me know if you have any luck with the dockerfile approach. I'm finding they don't have any good alternative to the build script which makes it problematic to run things like migrations in a clean way. More here: https://community.render.com/t/release-command-for-db-migrations/247/7

I am hopeful that render adds a release phase soon. Looks like it is "planned" according to https://render.canny.io/features/p/release-phase-script.