Django and VirtualEnv Development/Deployment Best Practices

Question

Just curious how people are deploying their Django projects in combination with virtualenv

• More specifically, how do you keep your production virtualenv\'s synched

Answer 1

I use this bootstrap.py: http://github.com/ccnmtl/ccnmtldjango/blob/master/ccnmtldjango/template/bootstrap.py

which expects are directory called 'requirements' that looks something like this: http://github.com/ccnmtl/ccnmtldjango/tree/master/ccnmtldjango/template/requirements/

There's an apps.txt, a libs.txt (which apps.txt includes--I just like to keep django apps seperate from other python modules) and a src directory which contains the actual tarballs.

When ./bootstrap.py is run, it creates the virtualenv (wiping a previous one if it exists) and installs everything from requirements/apps.txt into it. I do not ever install anything into the virtualenv otherwise. If I want to include a new library, I put the tarball into requirements/src/, add a line to one of the textfiles and re-run ./bootstrap.py.

bootstrap.py and requirements get checked into version control (also a copy of pip.py so I don't even have to have that installed system-wide anywhere). The virtualenv itself isn't. The scripts that I have that push out to production run ./bootstrap.py on the production server each time I push. (bootstrap.py also goes to some lengths to ensure that it's sticking to Python 2.5 since that's what we have on the production servers (Ubuntu Hardy) and my dev machine (Ubuntu Karmic) defaults to Python 2.6 if you're not careful)