Create and deploy a Python Django application

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In this sample application, you will create a web application using Django to serve web pages in Python, complete with standard best practices, including a health check.

This app contains an opinionated set of files for web serving:

app/templates/index.html
staticfiles/js/bundle.js
staticfiles/css/default.css

Steps

You can deploy this application to IBM Cloud or build it locally by cloning this repo first. Once your app is live, you can access the /health endpoint to build out your cloud native application.

Deploying to IBM Cloud

Deprecated: IBM® Cloud Foundry is deprecated. For more information, see Deprecation of IBM Cloud Foundry.

Click Deploy to IBM Cloud to deploy this same application to IBM Cloud. This option creates a deployment pipeline, complete with a hosted GitLab project and a DevOps toolchain. You can deploy your app to Cloud Foundry, a Kubernetes cluster, or a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. OpenShift is available only through a standard cluster, which requires you to have a billable account.

IBM Cloud DevOps services provides toolchains as a set of tool integrations that support development, deployment, and operations tasks inside IBM Cloud.

Building Locally

To get started building this application locally, you can either run the application natively or use the IBM Cloud Developer Tools for containerization and easy deployment to IBM Cloud.

Native Application Development

Install Python

Running Django applications has been simplified with a manage.py file to avoid dealing with configuring environment variables to run your app. From your project root, you can download the project dependencies with:

pipenv install

Then, activate this app's virtualenv:

pipenv shell

To run your application locally, run this inside the virtualenv:

python manage.py start

Your application will be running at http://localhost:3000. You can access the /health endpoint at the host. You can also verify the state of your locally running application using the Selenium UI test script included in the scripts directory.

Debugging locally

To debug a django project run python manage.py runserver with DEBUG set to True in settings.py to start a native django development server. This comes with the Django's stack-trace debugger, which will present runtime failure stack-traces. For more information, see Django's documentation.

IBM Cloud Developer Tools

Install IBM Cloud Developer Tools on your machine by running the following command:

curl -sL https://ibm.biz/idt-installer | bash

Create an application on IBM Cloud by running:

ibmcloud dev create

This will create and download a starter application with the necessary files needed for local development and deployment.

Your application will be compiled with Docker containers. To compile and run your app, run:

ibmcloud dev build
ibmcloud dev run

This will launch your application locally. When you are ready to deploy to IBM Cloud on Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes, run one of the commands:

ibmcloud dev deploy -t buildpack // to Cloud Foundry
ibmcloud dev deploy -t container // to K8s cluster

You can build and debug your app locally with:

ibmcloud dev build --debug
ibmcloud dev debug

Next Steps

Learn more about IBM Cloud and how to incorporate its services in your application.
Explore other sample applications on IBM Cloud.

License

This sample application is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2. Separate third-party code objects invoked within this code pattern are licensed by their respective providers pursuant to their own separate licenses. Contributions are subject to the Developer Certificate of Origin, Version 1.1 and the Apache License, Version 2.

Apache License FAQ

yale-winter / python-django-app