In this blog I will briefly describe my process of taking my local development work and putting it into production which is what I did with this site and its features.

For my development process I am using the simple local server that django/python provides you by running:

python manage.py runserver

If you are a more experienced dev then there are things such as virtualenv and fabric but I kept it simple for this first large project.

I use webfaction as my hosting service and love them. The admin side allows for easy installation of django and MySQL database creation from the browser! If you are looking into doing development I would definitely check out webfaction.

Now getting back on track below will be a list of things that will be different for production in the settings.py file from your local project.

• Set DEBUG and TEMPLATE_DEBUG = False
• Make sure to change your DATABASES if you plan on not using sqlite3
• Lastly make sure your static, media, and template settings are changed to match your production file layout.

I think the first two are pretty self explanatory and well documented in the django docs but the third gave me a bit of a headache. During development django will get static files from within your project but when DEBUG = False (which it should be when its in production) django will not serve those static files. In webfaction I have made a static application which lives at a specific URL and that will serve all my css, js, and other static files. For a more in depth look at deploying django check out the django book chapter 12. It is a bit old but got me through.

That sums it up thanks for reading!