Django Lesson 10: Deployment

Deploying Django requires a few production settings. We’ll use Railway for the easiest deployment path.

Production Settings

# settings.py production changes
DEBUG = False
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ["yourdomain.com", "yourapp.railway.app"]
SECRET_KEY = os.environ["SECRET_KEY"]  # from env var, never hardcode!

# Static files
import dj_database_url
DATABASES = {"default": dj_database_url.parse(os.environ["DATABASE_URL"])}

# pip install whitenoise
MIDDLEWARE = [
    "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
    "whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware",
    ...
]
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "staticfiles"
STATICFILES_STORAGE = "whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage"

Deploy to Railway

# requirements.txt (generate with pip freeze)
pip freeze > requirements.txt
# Add: gunicorn, whitenoise, dj-database-url, psycopg2-binary

# Procfile
web: gunicorn myblog.wsgi

# Deploy:
git push origin main
# Railway detects Django, runs migrations, starts server!