Python Leiden meetup: Deploying python apps with django-simple-deploy - Michiel Beijen¶

Tags: pun, python, django

(One of my summaries of the fourth Python meetup in Leiden, NL).

Michiel discovered django simple deploy via the django podcast.

Deploying? Previously, heroku was often used as an example in books, but they ditched their free tier and are pretty expensive now. So most examples nowadays just show you how to run django locally. Deploying is harder.

There are several hosting parties that provide relatively easy django hosting like heroku. https://fly.io, https://platform.sh and https://heroku.com . “Easy” is relative, as he ran into some problems with platform.sh and he didn’t have an ssh connection to fix it. And yesterday they nuked his account so he couldn’t re-try it for today’s demo.

Since recently there is also a generic “vps” plugin: just running on some random virtual server with ssh access that you can rent virtually anywhere. https://github.com/django-simple-deploy/dsd-vps . “Random” should be debian-like, btw.

He demoed it on a digitalocean VM (=”droplet”). With some environment variables he got it working within 15 minutes and some manual fixes. The longest wait was the “apt-get upgrade” call.

The VPS version of simple deploy has its drawbacks. It needs a root password, for instance, and at the moment it doesn’t accept ssh key authentication. He previously tried it on a transip.nl host, which doesn’t have a root user with a password: you get a regular user with sudo privileges. The VPS plugin doesn’t like that.

A second “manage.py deploy” (after a trivial template update) also did not work. One of the items it generated the first time was (of course) already created, so it failed the second time. Oh…

Anyway, the VPS version of django-simple-deploy doesn’t seem to work yet.