This is an opinionated Django cookiecutter template. It is useful for quick MVPs, prototypes and side projects that may grow over time if they gain traction, so solid foundations based on tried-and-tested solutions and best practices are important.

For a more configurable and complete starter template, https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django is strongly recommended.

It is assumed that you have basic familiarity with Django, Heroku and AWS.

• Docker for local development
• Turbo/StimulusJS for frontend
• Tailwind/PostCSS for CSS
• Celery
• Redis
• PostgreSQL
• Sentry for performance/error monitoring
• Heroku for deployment
• AWS/S3 for production static/media assets
• Mailgun for production emails
• Mailhog for local dev emails
• Custom user model

You should have the following installed on your development machine:

• Docker and docker-compose
• Cookiecutter (pip install cookiecutter)
• pre-commit hooks (pip install pre-commit)
• prettier (npm install -g prettier)
• eslint (npm install -g eslint)
• Heroku CLI (see https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli)

Now build the project:

cookiecutter https://github.com/danjac/django-saas-starter

Build your docker environment:

docker-compose build

A custom user model is provided. Open users/models.py and add any custom fields you might want at the start.

Next run migrations:

./scripts/manage makemigrations users

./scripts/manage migrate

You can run any other Django management commands locally with ./scripts/manage.

To run unit tests with pytest:

./scripts/runtests  [ARGS]

You can now start the application:

docker-compose up -d

You can access the site locally at http://localhost

To ensure all dependencies are up to date, you can use pip-tools (pip install piptools):

pip-compile requirements.in -o requirements.txt

And for frontend dependencies:

./scripts/yarn upgrade

Remember to do docker-compose build after updating backend or frontend dependencies.

Before your first Git commit, set up pre-commit hooks:

pre-commit install

Django-allauth is used for authentication. This package has its own set of templates that should be overridden if you want to have Tailwind-styled login and sign up pages. You can do this by copying the templates below to the templates/account folder in your project and modifying them as needed:

https://github.com/pennersr/django-allauth/tree/master/allauth/templates

Example configuration is provided for social logins e.g. Google or Facebook. See the all-auth docs for more details.

You can add custom classes in the file static/css/app.css using the @apply directive. Compilation should be on-the-fly using PostCSS. See the Tailwind docs for more details.

The Hotwired (Turbo/Stimulus) stack has been integrated to provide sufficient frontend interactivity without the complexity and overhead of an SPA architecture. A few simple controllers are included to get started with. A small middleware class is provided to handle redirects, as detailed in the documentation linked below.

Ensure you have the correct AWS settings in your generated .env file. We use a single bucket for both static and (user uploaded) media, with separate folders for each, so you just need to set up a single bucket for your deployment.

PostgreSQL and Redis buildpacks are required.

Set up Heroku, S3, Cloudfront and Git as per the instructions. You need to set up Heroku to deploy a Docker image:

heroku git:remote -a APP_NAME

Set the default Heroku buildpack to Python:

heroku buildpacks:set heroku/python -a myapp

For more details see:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/git

https://www.heroku.com/deploy-with-docker

You will need to set the following Heroku environment variables. This can be done on your Heroku app dashboard or by using the CLI action heroku config:set:

• ADMINS: comma separated in form my full name name@mysite.com,other name othername@mysite.com
• ADMIN_URL: should be something other than "admin/". Must end in forward slash.
• ALLOWED_HOSTS: enter your domains, separated by comma e.g. mysite.com, myothersite.com. If you are using wildcard domain with subdomains for each community you just need the wildcard domain without the "*".
• AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME: see your S3 settings
• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: see your S3 settings
• AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN: your cloudfront domain e.g. xyz123abcdefg.cloudfront.net
• DATABASE_URL: provided by Heroku PostgreSQL buildpack
• DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC: set to "1"
• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE: should always be myproject.config.settings.production
• MAILGUN_API_KEY: see your Mailgun settings
• MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN: see your Mailgun settings
• REDIS_URL: provided by Heroku Redis buildpack
• SECRET_KEY: Django secret key. Use e.g. https://miniwebtool.com/django-secret-key-generator/ to create new key.

Your S3 bucket should have the static folder for static content, and media if you wish to have user-uploaded content.

To deploy just run:

./scripts/deploy

This is a very barebones deployment that just pushes assets to S3 and deploys your application to Heroku. You may wish to expand this to use a CI/CD pipeline such as Github Actions or Travis, or Ansible or Terraform for provisioning servers, manage staging environments etc.

If you want to include Sentry for production performance and error monitoring, just uncomment the import in the settings module config/settings/production.py and set SENTRY_URL (as provided by your Sentry account) in your Heroku environment.

If you want to use Dokku instead of Heroku, first set up a Dokku application and domain as per the Dokku documentation specific to your provider (for example, on a Digital Ocean droplet).

dokku apps:create myapp

dokku domains:add myapp myapp.com

Make sure you add buildpacks for PostgreSQL and Redis:

dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-postgres.git

dokku postgres:create myapp_db

dokku postgres:link myapp_db myapp

dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-redis.git

dokku redis:create myapp_redis

dokku redis:link myapp_redis myapp

These should automatically set DATABASE_URL and REDIS_URL environment variables, as with the equivalent Heroku buildpacks.

Environment variables are as for Heroku (dokku config:set --no-restart). You should also set BUILDPACK_URL to https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-python. It is recommended to install LetsEncrypt for Dokku (see link below). You may also need to run dokku ps:scale myapp worker=1 to start the Celery worker.

• Hotwired/Turbo: https://turbo.hotwire.dev/
• StimulusJS: https://stimulusjs.org/
• Tailwind: https://tailwindcss.com/
• Dokku: https://github.com/dokku/dokku
• Dokku LetsEncrypt: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt.git

This project is covered by GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).