This is the fifth and last part of the django deploy environment, you may find the fourth part here.

In this part we'll see how to automate the deployment using fabric.

What the hell have fabric to do?

Well, fabric have to do all the work for me in the sense that once I've done some changes to my project and pushed them to the bare repository I want to update the production environment with only one command. I'd like also to setup initially the whole environment with only one command.

How does it work?

First of all install it, so with the virtualenv activated:

$ pip install fabric

Done.

Now reading from the official site:

Fabric is a Python (2.5 or higher) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting ...

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This is the third part of the django deploy environment, you may find the second part here.

In this part we'll see how to set up nginx and uwsgi to work with our django project.

Let's install and configure uwsgi

Be sure to have the virtualenv activated (see part 2), and then install uwsgi

$ pip install uwsgi

Ok now we have to configure our project to work with uwsgi, open and edit the myproject/myproject/wsgi.py file, mine looks like this:

"""
WSGI config for sic2012 project.

This module contains the WSGI application used by Django's development server
and any production WSGI deployments. It should expose a module-level variable
named ``application``. Django's ``runserver`` and ``runfcgi`` commands discover
this application via the ``WSGI_APPLICATION`` setting.

Usually you will have the standard Django WSGI application here, but it also
might make sense to replace the whole Django WSGI application with a custom one
that later delegates to the Django one. For example, you could introduce WSGI
middleware here, or combine a Django application with an application of another
framework.

"""
import os ...

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After googling for a while, asking my guru and some tests I was able to setup a deploy environment for django projects.

The web server is nginx, the database server mysql, I use uwsgi as wsgi server, all the code is versioned using git, the python libraries are installed in a virtualenv, db migration is assured by South and the deploy is automated using fabric.

While writing this post the whole environment is working but I think it may be adjusted in some ways, so let's take what follows as a guideline to improve in many aspects.

I assume we are working in locale and deploying directly to a production server, ignoring the staging phase.

Installing some packages (locale and remote)

To set up the environment we need python >= 2.6, python-dev, python-setuptools, pip and virtualenv, so (in a debian/ubuntu os):

$ sudo apt-get install python python-dev python-setuptools
$ sudo easy_install pip
$ pip install virtualenv

Ok that's all, the other python packages will be installed in the virtualenv, so now let's continue installing git and mysql

$ sudo apt-get install git ...

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