Deploying

Local development is great. But eventually you'll want to publish your site.

There's a million different ways to deploy a Django project, but if you use our all-in-one setup script, deployment to production is trivial.

Production runtime

The core challenge for a server deployment is that you need both, Python and Node.js in the same instance. Even with Docker, this can be tricky.

Fortunately, just like in local development, we use Nix inside a Docker image. It's optimized to be as light as can be, with only the runtime requirements. Review the Dockerfile provided after setup for details.

Hosting provider

Theoretically, you can run this Docker image anywhere. But we've scripted the entire deployment to fly.io for you.

Note: Fly is under heavy development and deployments can be spotty. Particularly for new applications and new accounts. Be patient, once it's working, it works quite well.

Initial deployment

Once you're ready to deploy your app, make sure you've committed your changes.

Then run scripts/launch.sh from BASE_DIR.

You'll almost certainly be asked to authenticate. And if you've never used Fly before, you'll have to sign up. Go ahead and do so.

Note: You'll probably be asked for a credit card to sign up. If you deploy a single app using our scripts, you'll remain in the free tier. The card requirement prevents abuse.

This script will:

• Create a free PostgreSQL instance on Fly.
• Create an application instance.
• Attach the instance to the database.
• Build the Dockerfile remotely and deploy it to the instance.
• Run database migrations.

Warning: Initial deploys to Fly are still spotty. If anything goes wrong, delete the fly.toml file that is created and re-rerun scripts/launch.sh. Make sure to delete any apps using the Fly dashboard to avoid being billed.

Follow up deployments

Deploying after this is as easy as running scripts/deploy.sh and waiting a few minutes. Migrations are auto-run for you after deployment.

SSH access

You may want to SSH into your app. Just run flyctl ssh console and you'll gain access to the running instance.

Note: There are a few quirks with the SSH session. You'll likely need to manually activate the virtualenv and cd into the WORKDIR of your Docker image.

Invoking manage.py commands

Note that the default Dockerfile deletes the default settings module and replaces it with an environment variable. So to run a manage.py command (for example, createsuperuser) on the fly.io app instance, you can set the correct environment via:

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=server.settings.production python manage.py

Custom domain

Adding a custom domain with TLS is easy. However, we don't automate the process because DNS steps vary depending on your registrar.

Just follow the steps in their documentation.

Next steps

Live deployments is still in heavy development, but both this site and a few others are hosted reliably on Fly.

Read the full Fly documentation and be sure to visit the community for support.