blog.md

Have you ever tried uploading your django app to heroku but felt it was too complicated? If so, in this segment we will look at how you can upload your app to heroku. Don't worry, it is going to be short and to the point.

For this tutorial, I will be assuming you have an app built, so the next step you will be delving into, is on how to deploy your app to heroku.

Keeping that in mind, let's dive in and see how we can setup the app.

Prepare your app

Requirements.txt

If you are already working in a virtualenv you can easily run to create your requirements.txt file. https://gist.github.com/e9b170b07f5ad310b79beb52690c6963

Procfile

• Create a file with name Procfile (Make sure to not have any extension). The Procfile should be in the same directory as your manage.py file.

• Install gunicorn. https://gist.github.com/41a62036d20697ff43de85adf74cc044

• Make sure to add gunicorn to your requirements.txt file.

• Add the following line to your Procfile. The app name is basically the folder name where you have your wsgi.py file. https://gist.github.com/61923a86ba6b6e7cc24e3c31b40699f1

settings.py

• Next we will be installing a package called django-heroku, after installing make sure to add it on the requirements.txt file.

https://gist.github.com/633fc00803165a92f7f92e9ee4fa9b19

• Now go to your settings.py and import it on top. https://gist.github.com/be5e0fdbfc2a69c211365242e99800b2

and paste this at the bottom of the file or else you are going to get a KeyError. https://gist.github.com/2bb602237854ef4303d4fc31a2c61d08

Django Static

• Now to setup the static assets. https://gist.github.com/d6f83409d4b0e7040b6bcf0a402b88ef

This will basically tell django where to look for the static files and which folder to look for when collectstatic is run.

• Install WhiteNoise and update your requirements.txt file. https://gist.github.com/841ebbbb879e16c6964e040725073efd

• Next, install WhiteNoise into your Django application. This is done in settings.py‘s middleware section (at the top): https://gist.github.com/07e35679d735f697d3387123791f08ce

• Finally, if you would like gzip functionality enabled, also add the following setting to settings.py. https://gist.github.com/8c3f01c67742f3758358d66b18b5623b

We will need to create one more file called runtime.txt. This will tell heroku which version of python needs to be installed. This step is optional because heroku will use a python version automatically when building but if you want a specific python version you can add it like this. https://gist.github.com/48222f0fcfd39f27c9492ff8fbc31547

That is it for configuring our app for deployment. Now we go to the heroku cli and see how to upload the app.

Deployment

If you don't have heroku installed on your machine follow this link

• login to heroku. https://gist.github.com/aafc3f4f36204c18e76d7a70a28d25f4

After successful login we will be able to create our app directly from the terminal.

• Create a heroku app https://gist.github.com/b506f9b0d4de8a3e578310425e784b8e

This will create a heroku app with a random available name. However, if you want to give a name of your choice, just add the name after heroku create. Make sure the name is unique and available.

• Now add all the files to git and commit. https://gist.github.com/43dcaf8548b8e535a63b87313c5c4e77

• Push all the files and build. https://gist.github.com/9ce0bd88c8157dbc98ef5d7253d3f0a5

Once done this will deploy your app. Once deployed, we will need to migrate our database.

https://gist.github.com/2eb8994a8f9a7892980ed3b56c9eabd2

This will give us a quick terminal to control our app. Here you can run all your django commands.

https://gist.github.com/3649f1235e8287ff84feb03913094e7a

• This will migrate all our files to the database.

Conclusion

That is all for now. If you have followed all the steps above you should have an app which is now running on heroku. If you have come across any issues please leave a comment or knock-me. I will try to help fix them.

Best of luck. Happy coding :D