Getting Started With Django On Heroku

Here is a set of instructions on how to get a Django app running on Heroku. This assumes you have a repo in github already.

First, create a new app in Heroku and connect the repo to github:

heroku login
heroku git:remote -a <APP_NAME>

Next, you can attach a Postgres database for free executing the following command:

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql

Next, you need to go back to the Heroku Admin Panel And Create A Database. I am using the dev version so my database is still free.

To tell django about your database, I recommend using the dj-database-url package. This can be done by inserting the following lines of code into you settings.py file.

import dj_database_url
DATABASES={}
DATABASES['default'] =  dj_database_url.config()

Tailing Heroku Log Files

To tail the current Heroku log files of your app, execute the following command

heroku logs -t 

Executing A Django Command

To execute a Django manage.py command, you can execute the following command

heroku run python manage.py syncdb

Getting to A Bash Shell

You can get to a bash shell pretty easily by executing the following command:

heroku run bash

And you can get to a Python REPL with Django settings by executing the following command:

heroku run python manage.py shell

Copying a File

heroku run 'cp some_file copied_file'