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I'm a strong proponent of version control, and am starting work on a Django project. I've done a few before, and have tried a few different approaches, but I haven't yet found a decent structure that I actually feel comfortable with.

Here's what I want:

a) Source code checked into version control

b) Preferably the environment is not checked into version control (something like buildout or pip requirements.txt is fine for setting up the environment)

c) A reasonable "get a new developer going" story

d) A reasonable deployment story - preferably the entire deployment environment could be generated by a script on the server

It seems to me like someone has to have done this before, but many hours of searching have all led to half-baked solutions that don't really address all of these.

Any thoughts on where I should look?

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2 Answers 2

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Look at fabric to manage deployments.

This is what I use to manage servers/deployments with fabric: louis (it is just a collection of fabric commands). I keep a louisconf.py file with each project.

I'd recommend using a distributed VCS (git, hg,...) instead of svn. The reason being that the ease of branching allows for several schemes for deployment. You can have, for example, production and staging branches. Then you enforce that the only merges into production happen from staging by convention.

As for getting developers started quickly you have it right with pip and requirements.txt. I think that also means that you are using virtualenv, but if not that's the third piece. I'd recommend getting a basic README in place. Have the first assignment of each developer that joins a project be to update the README.

The rough way to get someone on board is to have her checkout the code, create a virtualenv, and install the requirements.

I'd recommend having a settings.py file that works with sqlite3 and such that a new developer can use to just get going fast (ie after installing the requirements). However, how you manage the different settings files depends on your project layout. There should be some set of default settings for new developers to use, though.

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I'm going to try Fabric and see if it solves my "deployment story" problem. I accepted the other answer because it has more about directory structure in it. Thanks for the help!
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I keep a projects/ directory in my home directory (on Linux). When I need to start a new project, I make a new, shortly-named (that sufficiently describes the project) dir in projects/; that becomes the root of a new virtualenv (with --no-site-packages) for that project.

Inside that dir (after I've installed the venv, sourced it, and installed the copy of django I'll be working with), I "django-admin.py startproject" a subdir, normally by the same short name. That dir becomes the root of my hg repo (with a quick hg init and ci), no matter how small the project.

If there's any chance of sharing the project with other developers (a project for work, for example), I include a pip requirements.txt at the repo root. Only project requirements go in there; django-debug-toolbar and django-extensions, staples for my dev workflow, are not project requirements, for example. South, when we use it, is.

As for the django project, I normally keep the default settings.py, possibly with a few changes, and add the local_settings convention to the end of it (try: from local_settings import *; except ImportError: pass). My and other devs' specific environment settings (adding django-extensions and django-debug-toolbar to installed apps, for example) go in local_settings.py, which is not checked in to version control. To help a new dev out, you could provide a template of that file as local_settings.py.temp, or some other name that won't be used for any other purpose, but I find that this unnecessarily clutters the repo.

For personal projects, I normally include a README if I plan on releasing it publicly. At work, we maintain Trac environments and good communication to get new devs up to speed on a project.

As for deployment, as rz mentioned, I hear fabric is really good for that kind of automated local/remote scripting, though I haven't really taken the chance myself to look into it.

For the uninitiated, a typical shell session for this might look like the following:

$ cd ~/projects/
$ mkdir newproj
$ cd newproj/
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages .
$ source bin/activate
(newproj)$ pip install django django-debug-toolbar django-extensions
... installing stuff ...
(newproj)$ django-admin.py startproject newproj
(newproj)$ cd newproj/
(newproj)$ hg init .; hg ci -A -m "Initial code"
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4 Comments

Ahhhh doing the checkout into the virtualenv. This seems like a good approach. Thanks!
Now that I've started doing this, I'm running into a problem I had before. When the repository goes into the virtualenv like this, I don't have a place to put additional (non-deployed) things into VC. For example, if I were to use fabric, I'd want my fabfile to be versioned, but now the root of the django project is the top of my VC. I suppose making sub-directories first and then putting the Django project in a sub-directory would work. I'll keep trying.
At work, the dir structure they've adopted is project/env/www/proj/, where "project" is a base container for everything, "env" is the virtualenv root, "www" is the project's apache "DocumentRoot" (though you really shouldn't have a DocumentRoot with a django project), and "proj" is the root of the django project and source repo. You could take this approach and move the repo one level up (so "www" becomes the repo root), if you really need to version files outside the django root.
I ended up doing it a bit different and I think I've finally found a layout I like. The whole project is in SVN, but the virtualenv is added to svn:ignore (or .hgignore, accordingly). This means that all of the fabric stuff is still in version control.

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