How to start a Django project in 2012

django_2012.md

(with Heroku deployment)

First, warm up your system.

easy_install pip
pip install virtualenv
pip install django
gem install heroku

Start a project.

django-admin.py startproject [myproject]
cd !$

Setup virtualenv and start it up.

virtualenv --no-site-packages ve
source ve/bin/activate

(ve for virtualenv isn't that nice and terse? You can call it whatever you want.)

Create a requirements.txt file.

Django
psycopg2
south

(psycopg2 is a PostgreSQL adapter for Python.)

While you're still inside of your virtualenv, load your requirements.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Put south in your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.

Now go make something awesome.

---

Aside: how to update your database with South and push the changes to Heroku:

1. Make changes to your models
2. ./manage.py schemamigration [appname] --auto
3. ./manage.py migrate [appname]
4. [commit & push changes to heroku]
5. heroku run ./manage.py migrate [appname]

Sources

• Deploying Django applications on Heroku
• Part 1: The Basics — South v0.7 documentation
• Getting Started with Django on Heroku/Cedar | Heroku Dev Center

This is a Solutions Log post.

why are you install django at the system level and at the virtualenv level?

@binarydud, Just for the initial setup of a new project. Not necessary, I guess.