Hosting Django projects on Heroku

FilmFinder was the capstone project at UNSW. I developed it with three other people, but except the movie recommendation feature, I have coded or edited all the other features. While learning Django from scratch.

I intend to present it somewhere, so that I could show it to my future employers. I come across Heroku and it seems great. It has a free tier and the deploy process looks like it is rather easy.

Well it turns out some of the documentations on how to deploy it are out dated. I followed Configuring Django Apps for Heroku and it was very confusing. It asks me to create a Procfile with the following content: web: gunicorn myproject.wsgi and install Gunicorn via Pip. OK, but what is myproject.wsgi ? Do I need to create it? Where do I get the name myproject? I had to do few more researches and find there is a line in the settings.py of my project like this:

WSGI_APPLICATION = 'FilmFinder.wsgi.application'

So I should replace myproject with FilmFinder . Next step is using django-heroku package, unfortunately, the repository of this package on Github is archived. When I tried to install it, it returns lots of errors and the installation is unsuccessful. There is no information on what to do on Heroku’s documentations nor the Github repository. I’m again, on my own. After some more researches, I found that somebody forked the previous repository and renamed it to django-on-heroku . Installed it and finally the project is on Heroku.

However, the database is empty. Because Heroku does not use SQLite as we used in our project (Django default). I found the following instruction from this link:

We need to transfer the data from the local database to the production database. Install the Heroku PGBackups add-on:

$ heroku addons:add pgbackups

However, it is outdated again because PG Backups as an add-on has been deprecated. Fortunately, the functions seems point to PG Backups commands and I found the following restore command:

$ heroku pg:backups:restore 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/me/items/mydb.dump' DATABASE_URL -a sushi

Ok, so if we can dump our database then upload it on a publicly accessible URL we are golden? How do we dump the database? The following steps look promising:

Migrate Django development database (.sql3) to Heroku

I followed the above steps however I’m stuck at step 6 with fixture issues. Maybe I should start at the empty PostgreSQL and insert data in? Then start at step 7. After restoring the database dump I finally got it working on https://filmfinder.herokuapp.com.