Automating initial deployments with django-simple-deploy

Deployment has been a sticking point for many Django developers as long as the framework has existed. With the 1.0 release of django-simple-deploy, that should no longer be the case. This release signifies a stable API, and most importantly a stable platform for building plugins.

If you haven't seen django-simple-deploy in action, it lets you deploy a project in three steps. Assuming you have the target platform's CLI installed, here's what that looks like:

$ pip install django-simple-deploy[<platform_name>]
# Add django_simple_deploy to INSTALLED_APPS.
$ python manage.py deploy --automate-all

This currently works for Platform.sh, Fly.io, and Heroku. If you want a bit more control, you can separate out the configuration and deployment steps.

The plugin ecosystem

The core django-simple-deploy library only does a little work. It inspects your system and your project, and then hands off to an external plugin (such as dsd-platformsh) to take care of platform-specific configuration and deployment work. It should be possible to write a plugin for just about any hosting platform that can be configured to support Django.

Each PAAS provider needs its own plugin. However, a single plugin, dsd-vps, can be used to deploy to any VPS host: Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, and many more.

This talk will discuss the following:

• Why does the Django community need a deployment library?
• What kinds of deployments can django-simple-deploy handle today?
• What is the full range of use cases and benefits of this tool?
• How can you contribute to the plugin ecosystem?

Just about everyone in the community is affected by Django's deployment story. If you'd like Django to have a much simpler initial deployment story, this talk is for you.