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Fabric & Django
Or how automate the creation of new projects with simple script
Preface: Do you remember all this tiny little steps that you have to perform every time when you start new project – create virtual environment, install packages, start and setup Django project? Kind of annoying repetition, isn’t it? How about to automate it a bit.
Solution: Recently I started learning Fabric and thought “What better way to test it in practice than automating a simple, repetitive task?”. So, lets mark the tasks that I want the script to perform:
- Create virtual environment with the project name
- Activate the virtual environment
- Download list of packages and install them
- Make ‘src’ directory where the project source will reside
- Create new Django project in source directory
- Update the settings
Thanks to the local command the first one was easy. The problem was with the second one. Obviously each local command is run autonomously so I had to find some way have activated virtual environment for each task after this. Fortunately the prefix context manager works like a charm. I had some issues making it read and write in the paths I wants and voilà it was working exactly as I want.
The script is too long to place it here but is publicly available at https://gist.github.com/2818562
It is quite simple to use, you only need python, fabric and virtual environment. Then just use the following code.
fab start_project:my_mew_project
To Do: Here are few things that can be improved:
- Read the packages from a file
- Update urls.py to enable admin
- Generate Nginx server block file
So this is my first try with Fabric, I hope that you will like it and find it useful. As always any comments, questions and/or improvement ideas are welcome.
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You may want to take a look at the fabfile and Django project template I’m sharing at github. I recently updated it for the new directory layout of Django 1.4 and added some extra functionality.
I’ve learned a lot about Fabric and deploying Django writing this and I extended the project to be able to setup Nginx and gunicorn in development, staging and production environments.
It’s great to know more people are using Fabric and are automating Django deployment.
Cheers!
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Instead of
for package in PACKAGES_LIST:
local('pip install %s' % package)
you may take a look at pip requirements file: http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/requirements.html
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Also, here is a setup we use at Blade Polska http://www.askthepony.com/blog/2011/07/setup-a-complete-django-server-deploy-rollback-–-all-in-one-powerful-script/
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About the urls.py modification on your todo list: We’ve managed that by creating our own project template. Read Django’s manage.py startproject documentation for more details.
Basically, you have to create your own copy of Django’s default project template, customize it, store it as a directory or tarball and give its path when you create a project.