A modern Django (1.4) project skeleton.

• author: Randall Degges
• email: rdegges@gmail.com
• status: maintained, in development
• notes: Have feedback? Please send me an email. This project is still in its infancy, and will be changing rapidly.

For background, see: http://rdegges.com/deploying-django

Essentially--deploying Django projects is hard. There are lots of things you need to take into consideration. Being a Django user for years, I believe I've found some extremely useful patterns to help manage all sorts of Django sites (from the very smallest apps, to the largest).

This project is meant to be a boilerplate project for starting development. It is heavily opinionated in terms of services and tools--but I think the tradeoff is worthwhile.

The full project documentation is hosted at RTFD: http://django-skel.rtfd.org/. They are continuously updated to reflect changes and information about the project, so be sure to read them before using this boilerplate.

django-skel currently supports Django 1.4. To create a new django-skel base project, run the following command (this assumes you have Django 1.4 installed already):

$ django-admin.py startproject --template=https://github.com/mpuig/django-skel/zipball/master woot
$ heroku config:add DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=myproject.settings.prod

Where woot is the name of the project you'd like to create.

This is possible because Django 1.4's startproject command allows you to fetch a project template over HTTP (which is what we're doing here).

While not strictly required, it is also recommended to do

 $ heroku config:add SECRET_KEY=putsomethingfairlycomplexhere

The production settings pull SECRET_KEY from environment but fallbacks to a value which is generated mainly for development environment.

This setup allows you to easily keep your site in a public repo if you so wish without causing opening a route to attack your Django passwords.

To install the local dependencies (that you'll need to run your site locally), run the following command::

$ pip install -r reqs/dev.txt
...

Before you start coding, let's bootstrap our SQLite database (for local development), and test our the Django admin panel just to make sure everything's working::

$ python manage.py syncdb
...
$ python manage.py migrate
...
$ python manage.py runserver
...

Assuming everything's working, you should now be able to visit http://localhost:8000/admin/ in your web browser, and log in.

The syncdb command here just initializes our database, and the migrate command applies our South migrations.