Seeking reviewers for a "Guide to Idiomatic Django Deployment"

[George London]

Hi All!

As a fairly recently self-taught Djangonaut, I was a bit dissatisfied with the existing resources for learning to deploy Django in a production setting. There are lots of blog posts about how to configure specific services but really not much that recommends which services to use or how to bring everything together (except for guides like http://www.deploydjango.com/ that recommend just using Heroku.)

I think it would be really helpful for new-comers to have a clear, opinionated guide to "commonly accepted (i.e. idiomatic)" deployment best practices. Or at least I know it would have really helped me.

So I decided to write such a guide. I'm painfully aware that it's presumptuous for someone with my limited experience to make "best practices" recommendations. So to avoid recommending things that are dumb, I'm hoping some of our community's heavy weights could heavy-weigh in and verify that my recommendations make sense.

I've got a full draft prepared. If you'd be interested in reviewing it (or can recommend someone I should ask directly), please email me directly.

-George

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George London
E: george....@gmail.com
T: @rogueleaderr
B: rogueleaderr.com
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[Vijay Khemlani]

Wouldn't it be better to publish the book the same way as the Django Book (http://www.djangobook.com/, https://github.com/jacobian/djangobook.com) instead of looking for private reviewers?

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[James Turley]

Hi George,

As a fellow relative n00b to Django (and 'serious' web development), I think this is a very good idea. I'm working through Harry Percival's excellent book, and only got hopelessly lost during the deployment chapter (admittedly, I was attempting to deploy to 'production' through my development machine - an effort which succeeded principally in FUBARing my Apache settings for about a week, and possibly sucking knowledge of unix sockets etc out of my brain. Lessons have been learned).

More broadly, one of the first major brain-teasers for PHP refugees (*cough*) coming to Django or Rails or whatever is the loss of that "open filezilla, upload folder, done" deployment workflow.

Obviously I'm not the person to help you with this, however. :-)

JT

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[Javier Guerra Giraldez]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 7:34 PM, George London <george....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think it would be really helpful for new-comers to have a clear, opinionated guide to "commonly accepted (i.e. idiomatic)" deployment best practices. Or at least I know it would have really helped me.

wish you the best luck, hopefully it will be a usefull resource for us all.

as for my 2bits of advice: remember that there's not "single one" best
and recommended deployment strategy. AFAIK, there are at least three
options that just _have_ to be considered:

- nginx + uWSGI (pros: most flexible process handling, can be the
fastest of all)

- Apache + mod_wsgi (pros: integration in Apache ecosystem, makes
process handling almost transparent, maybe the only good choice for
windows servers)

- nginx + gunicorn (pros: mostly python, good docs, can be used
without nginx for development)


honestly, covering these three is a "make or break" for me. that is,
I would never recommend anybody (no matter how newbie) a deployment
guide that doesn't cover at least those.

(of course, a real newbie shouldn't have to get into deployment issues
until needed. the development setup is more than enough to learn the
platform)

--
Javier

[pnich...@gmail.com]

This sounds great!  I'm still learning myself (coming up on 2 years experience) so I'm a little hesitant to volunteer to offer opinions on content, but I'm an excellent proofreader and would love to help out.  I talk English much good and spel grate.

Best,
Paul

[Derek]

I agree there is a huge amount to learn in development... but deployment to a Real Live Server is not trivial; I have read two different (and each fairly detailed) guides so far, and still cannot get things working...  for me, a really good guide would also include "trouble-shooting"  - along the lines of "if you get a blank screen here, look here & there - change X to Y - restart Z by doing ABC" etc.  Such details could be built up by the community if the guide was open-sourced as suggested previously, rather than hosted on a blog somewhere...

[Thomas Murphy]

To all that are having trouble with live server deployment, have you
tried Python Anywhere as a start? It's the method introduced in the
Tango with Django tut, and it's the easiest "deploy with Django" live
environment I've seen.

-Excellent error logging
-bash and sql shells
-great support

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Sincerely,
Thomas Murphy
Code Ninja
646.957.6115

[George London]

@Vijay:

I've actually got the guide up on Github much like that (you can find it via my Github, if you're motivated). You can check out the draft here: https://github.com/rogueleaderr/definitive_guide_to_django_deployment.

I was a bit nervous about throwing it directly in front of this community before it's been reviewed, but...what the heck. Have at it. :)