Part 4️⃣ of how to django 💃

Image: Deploying your Django app to Heroku by Jennie Ron Ablog

Let’s wrap it up! This is the final part of my four-part guide for building a simple blog app using the Django web framework.

Outline

Part 1: Initializing your Django application

Part 2: Creating the Django application interface

Part 3: Getting data from Django forms

Part 4: Deploying your Django app ⬅️ You are here!

Set up Heroku
Set up static assets and database configuration.
Create the heroku app.
Configure the git repository within the project and deploy!

1. Set up Heroku.

We will use the Heroku CLI to deploy your app. First you will need to create an account. After doing so, you need to set up the configurations in your Django project for deployment.

Create a heroku account here if you haven’t already.
Install the Heroku CLI. I use brew to install heroku. Click here for instructions for other OS.
```
brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku
```
Log-in to heroku through the terminal and enter your credentials.
```
heroku login
```
Add a Procfile in the project root directory through the terminal. Use the name of your project, in this guide, we use mysite.
```
echo web: gunicorn mysite.wsgi --log-file - > Procfile
```
Create the file runtime.txt and add your version of python.
```
echo python-3.7.1 > runtime.txt
```

Install these packages in your virtual environment.

source djangoenv/bin/activate
pip install gunicorn dj-database-url whitenoise psycopg2

Edit the requirements.txt and add contents to it using the following command.
```
pip freeze > requirements.txt
```

2. Set up static assets and database configuration.

Next is you’ll need to set up the configuration for your static assets and database. Here, assume that you have a static folder within your project directory. You can also create it and put some custom CSS and other static files in it. Either way, you need to edit settings.py to make it work both in development and production.

Open [settings.py](http://settings.py) and paste the following block of code at the bottom of the file.

 # Extra lookup directories for collectstatic to find static files
 STATICFILES_DIRS = (
     os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static'),
 )
 #Add configuration for static files storage using whitenoise
 STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage'
 import dj_database_url 
 prod_db  =  dj_database_url.config(conn_max_age=500)
 DATABASES['default'].update(prod_db)

Also in the same file, add whitenoise middleware in the MIDDLEWARE list.
```
'whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware',
```

3. Create the heroku app.

Choose a unique name for your application and create it via terminal.
```
heroku create myblogsite
```
Heroku will let you know if it’s a success. Add your app domain name to ALLOWED_HOSTS in settings.py.
```
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['localhost', 'myherokuappname.herokuapp.com']
```
Set DEBUG = False in settings.py. so that the page renders the standard Error 404 and not a bug message.

4. Configure git repository within the project folder and deploy!

Initialize a git repository within your project folder if you haven’t already.
```
git init
```
Add your heroku app as a remote branch.
```
heroku git:remote -a myblogsite
```
Add all your project files and do an initial commit.
```
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
```
Disable collect static for your app. Finally, push it to heroku master branch to deploy and migrate the db.
```
heroku config:set DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC=1
git push heroku master
heroku run python manage.py migrate
```

And that’s it! 🏁

Congratulations! You now have your first ever Django application. I hope you had a good time and that I made it easier for you somehow. Go forth and make more Django applications!