Heroku is a cloud-based platform as a service (PaaS) that lets developers easily deploy their apps to the web. The service includes a free tier, so it can be great for sharing hobby projects or messing around with cloud deployment. If you’ve already started your own Django app and are ready to make it live, then this article will show you how to get it on Heroku.

Files/Packages to Add to Your Django Project

Django-Heroku Package

The Django-Heroku Package will take care of settings configuration for deploying a Django app to Heroku. Add this package to your project with pipenv:

pipenv install django-heroku

At the bottom of your settings.py file, add this code so your Heroku deployment will have environment variables like DATABASE_URL, ALLOWED_HOSTS, etc. automatically configured:

# Configure Django App for Heroku.
import django_heroku
django_heroku.settings(locals())

Green Unicorn

Gunicorn (or ‘Green Unicorn’) is a WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) Server that ensures that your Django app can communicate with web servers.

Add Gunicorn to your project with pipenv:

pipenv install gunicorn

Procfile

Heroku apps use a Procfile for declaring processes that will run when the app is started up.

In your project’s root, create a new file named Procfile (notice there is no file extension). Within that file, declare a web process that invokes Gunicorn:

web: gunicorn <project_directory>.wsgi

In the above web process command, <project_directory> is just a placeholder; this is where you will provide the name of your project directory (the directory containing settings.py).

For example, if your project has this structure:

Pipfile     Pipfile.lock    Procfile    manage.py   my_django_project

then your Procfile will contain:

web: gunicorn my_django_project.wsgi

Be sure to commit these changes to your project’s Git repository.

Deploying to Heroku

Now that you have your project configured for Heroku, you can actually deploy it on the platform.

Before anything, you’ll need to create a Heroku account and then create a new app for your project from the dashboard.

You’ll also need to install the Heroku CLI to interact with your Heroku app on the command line. Using Homebrew:

brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku

Heroku gives you a few deployment methods, and this article will cover two of them: Heroku Git and GitHub. You can find all the deployment methods, with information about each of them, under the ‘Deploy’ tab of the Heroku Dashboard.

Deployment with Heroku Git

This method involves adding Heroku as a remote repository and pushing the application to it, which will then deploy to the platform.

You’ll need to log in:

heroku login

Add the remote repository:

heroku git:remote -a <the-name-of-your-heroku-app>

Push to the remote repository to deploy your app to Heroku:

git push heroku master

Deployment with GitHub

If you’d prefer not to have to manage a separate remote repository for Heroku deployments, you can connect your project’s GitHub repository and deploy from there.

Under the ‘Deploy’ tab of the Heroku Dashboard, select ‘GitHub’ in the ‘Deployment method’ section and then find your project’s repository in the ‘Connect to GitHub’ section. You can either deploy your app with the ‘Deploy Branch’ button under the ‘Manual deploy’ section, or enable automatic deployments in the ‘Automatic deploys’ section.

With automatic deployments enabled, any time you commit to the master branch, your app will also deploy to Heroku.

Additional Heroku Configuration

Regardless of the deployment method you choose, you will have to set up some things on your Heroku app.

Be sure to log in:

heroku login

Run migrations on the Heroku app:

heroku run python3 manage.py migrate

Create a new superuser for logging in to the Django admin dashboard:

heroku run python3 manage.py createsuperuser

You can set environment variables with the config:set command. For example:

heroku config:set DEBUG=False

After going through these deployment steps successfully, you’ll be able to see your Django project on the web by adding .herokuapp.com to the end of your Heroku app’s name!