Deploying to Heroku manual

Heroku-Deployment.md

A guide for deploying to Heroku

Info:

This guide shows a simple step by step tutorial for deploying django applications.

Tested with django 2.2.5

Requirements:

Starters:

• A heroku account
• Heroku CLI

Files needed:

• A django application
• A Procfile
• a .env file
• a runtime.txt file

Installations:

• gunicorn
• whitenoise
• Python dotenv
• Python-decouple
• dj-database-url
• psycopg2

Let's setup our app :)

1. Login to your heroku account

	 heroku login

2. Create a heroku application

In this case, we'll create an app called picsgarage

	heroku create picsgarage

Heroku apps include a Procfile that specifies the commands that are executed by the app’s dynos.

3. Create a Procfile

$ touch Procfile

Add the following settings to your Procfile

web: gunicorn your_project_name.wsgi --log-file -

4. Selecting a runtime

To specify a Python runtime, add a runtime.txt file to your app’s root directory that declares the exact version number to use:

nano runtime.txt

Add the version below to the runtime.txt file python python-3.7.2

5. Whitenoise: Django Static Files settings

First configure static related parameter in settings.py

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))
# Static files (CSS, JavaScript, Images)
# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/howto/static-files/
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles')
STATIC_URL = '/static/'

# Extra places for collectstatic to find static files.
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static'),
)

Django does not support serving static files in production. However, WhiteNoise project can integrate into your Django application, and was designed with exactly this purpose in mind. So, let's install whitenoise

pip install whitenoise

Next, install WhiteNoise into your Django application. This is done in settings.py’s middleware section (at the top):

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    # Simplified static file serving.
    # https://warehouse.python.org/project/whitenoise/
    'whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware',
    ...```

Add the following setting to `settings.py` in the static files section to enable gzip functionality.

```python
# Simplified static file serving.
# https://warehouse.python.org/project/whitenoise/

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage'

Requirements file.

If your under a virtual environment run the command below to generate the requirements.txt file which heroku will use to install python package dependencies.

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Make sure the following are on the file

dj-database-url==0.4.2
Django==2.0.2
dj-static==0.0.6
gunicorn==19.7.1
psycopg2-binary==2.7.4
python-decouple==3.1
unicodecsv==0.14.1
whitenoise==3.3.1
Unipath==1.0

Adding environment variables to .env file

Create a .env file on your root folder by running the command,

touch .env 

Add the following to the .env file

SECRET_KEY='309899das98yaifuwh32547lmnj3k5lb34hk6bhj5b36i'  
DEBUG=True  
DB_NAME='picsgarage'  
DB_USER='vick'  
DB_PASSWORD='p'  
DB_HOST='127.0.0.1'  
MODE='dev'  
ALLOWED_HOSTS='*'

or an easier way

SECRET_KEY='309899das98yaifuwh32547lmnj3k5lb34hk6bhj5b36i'  
DEBUG=True 
DATABASE_URL='postgres://vick:p@localhost/picsgarage'
MODE='dev'  
ALLOWED_HOSTS='*'

Install the following python packages first;

pip install python-dotenv

pip install django-heroku

pip install python-decouple

pip install dj-database-url

Add the following to the settings.py imports

import os  
  
import dj_database_url  
import django_heroku  
from decouple import config, Csv  
from dotenv import load_dotenv  
  
load_dotenv()

Adding the SECRET_KET to the config file

SECRET_KEY = config('SECRET_KEY')

Setting DEBUG values

DEBUG = config('DEBUG', default=False, cast=bool)

DATABASES configurations

DATABASES = {  
  'default': {  
  'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',  
  'NAME': config('DB_NAME'),  
  'USER': config('DB_USER'),  
  'PASSWORD': config('DB_PASSWORD'),  
  'HOST': config('DB_HOST'),  
  }  
}

or use the easy way

DATABASES = {  
    'default':  dj_database_url.config(  
        default=config('DATABASE_URL')  
    )  
}

Then add the code below under the DATABASES object

db_env = dj_database_url.config(conn_max_age=500)  
DATABASES['default'].update(db_env)  
ALLOWED_HOSTS = config('ALLOWED_HOSTS', cast=Csv())

Pushing your DB to heroku

Run the command below to push your local db to heroku

syntax ==> heroku pg:push <db_name> DATABASE_URL --app <heroku_app_name>

heroku pg:push picsgarage DATABASE_URL --app picsgarage

And that's it...Your app should now be deployed to Heroku

improved from @jakhax deployment manual

© Victor Waichigo 2019