I have been a Django developer for a few years now. If you are like me and you start a lot of new Django projects, trust me when I say you do not have time NOT to use this. Awesome tool that helps you get up and running with an new Django project quickly. Go, now, quick...start using it.
Or just have a skeleton/boilerplate code in a repo and clone it for each new project. Here's mine http://github.com/senko/dj-skeletor (feat. south, debug toolbar, raven/sentry, fabric).
I’m really sorry to get all critical, but if you personally have to SSH into the server to do setup or deployment—especially if you have to be root—you’re doing it wrong.
I also feel that if anyone or anything has to SSH into a server for deployment, it could be done better. I use Chef to automate all of this stuff; it's surprising that we have great tools like Chef, Puppet and CFEngine and people still feel the need to write custom collections of fragile scripts to get basic stuff done.
Did you look at the actual main aspect of this simple tool, or just the one folder with the server-script? As previously mentioned. The main aspect of this is the automatic _Django Project Builder_, not "a collection of fragile scripts to get basic stuff done".
However, I still haven't found enough reason to switch from using SSH for deployment. It's almost always three lines. ssh; git pull; ./manage.py syncdb/migrate/collectstatic.
The only hindrance has been configuring the site to work on the server for the first time, i.e what the site at this link claims to solve.
I've spent several hours on fabric before but gave up when I realised I've spent more time on learning it than the time I spent deploying my code.
Can you tell me what I am missing out? I'm still relatively new to django deployment and I feel I'm missing something but I haven't found it yet.
What if you want to redeploy a configuration change to your web servers? What if you want to ensure such changes get re-deployed everytime a change is made to a config file?
These are problems that can be solved in an afternoon, and then never repeated ever again.
You need to be using automation.
We have something like 16-17 servers, of which 4-5 are actually production servers. Every single one of them was provisioned, configured, and are pushed to via my code.
Everything from haproxy, to the frontend web servers, to the backend web servers, to the frontend assets, the CDN, the image server, the backups, our staging cluster, experimental cluster, databases...all of it is automated.
Do it once, do it right, do it in code, never do it manually again.
The idempotence is just so you can repeat the same job over and over if it fails halfway between without causing any breakage.
Now GluStik scratched my itch of needing a very specific, custom layout, represented in code, and plopping in Django's files (like settings) so it provides hooks to use Django's templates. I'm curious what sort of design decisions went into project builder and what plans exist to support emerging trends?
For instance, I would much rather have a settings package with base.py and local.py inside where my local settings can extend base settings (like INSTALLED_APPS += ('debugtoolbar',) ala Brack3t's Modular Settings https://github.com/brack3t/django-modular-settings
I realize this isn't the default Django behavior but I know more than a couple developers that use this format. So if project builder is about "sane defaults" and the masses prefer this is there a plan to support it (or other, similar developer centric preferences that are outside the "Django way")?
We have included settings_local.py for development purposes, which gets imported by settings.py if it can be found. The main purpose for this is for the settings_local.py to be using sqlite3 rather than postgres, which is the default in settings.py.
Another thing which is kind of hidden is the ptm1.4 branch. This is a branch that includes a lot more, and will be growing quickly. We wanted the master branch to be generic as possible, and have it so people can easily switch out our defaults for their own, i.e. changing any of the files in django-files/ for their specific needs.
In regards to supporting other 'preferred practices', we welcome people to fork this repo and contribute stuff back. The master branch will be staying more generic, but we are all for best practices no matter if they are the "Django way".
You do see the difference between importing local settings into settings.py and importing both of them from separate modules in a package's init so they can override (per my example), yes?
I feel like you should take a harder look at the modular settings link I included. MUCH better way to solve this problem.
Release early, release often :-). We decided to launch this as soon as we thought other people could benefit from it. That day is today.
As stated in the docs, the server-side auto-deploy code assumes you're running Ubuntu. Removing such assumptions is a high priority (see TODO.md).
That said, the whole "start a new pre-configured Django project with lots of stuff pre-configured" thing is ready now and only assumes you're on a Unixy OS.
Even though it doesn't seem to be the case when viewing the README, this is more for automatically creating a Django app rather than the deployment process. There are things like Chef, or even Fabric, which are far more swag for auto-deployment.
The core aspect of this is the Django defaults and the front-end stuff. The server scripts are in a separate folder for a reason.
Heh. Whatever nifty location rewriting javascript you're using makes it impossible for me to browse your site - eg. http://www.nutrivise.com/#terms/ just points to your homepage.
Also: the 'terms of use' on that page are bogus. "The most advanced nutrition system [evar!!1!]" vs. "NUTRIVISE MAKES NO WARRANTIES ABOUT THE ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, COMPLETENESS, OR TIMELINESS OF THE MATERIAL OR THE WEB SITE ... WHETHER BASED ON THIRD PARTY INFORMATION OR ON RATINGS GENERATED BY NUTRIVISE." Oh? So what are people paying you for then, if not expert advice that you're willing to stand behind?
The problem is that a lot of it is hacky and somewhat specific to our site. Not necessarily generalizable.
I will say this though, I've been using Fabric for a very long time and abuse it with glee.
Are there any dev-opsy/provisioning/whatever type pain points you'd like a blog post or exposition on?
Edit: I'm the CTO. I'm open to open sourcing our stuff, but the lack of generalizability makes it less than useful. There's an abundance of magic in our stack that automates everything. Idempotence was a core design goal.
Edit2: For local development, I automate everything surrounding the python packages and the virtualenvs for the various repos we have as well. It's pretty damned handy.