Configure new Heroku Django project on Linux with Virtualenv

1. Install Heroku Toolbelt:


wget -qO- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install.sh | sh

then

$ heroku login
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: kenneth@example.com
Password:
Could not find an existing public key.
Would you like to generate one? [Yn]
Generating new SSH public key.
Uploading ssh public key /Users/kenneth/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

2. Install pip

Install pip and virtualenv for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick and newer

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev build-essential 
$ sudo pip install --upgrade pip 
$ sudo pip install --upgrade virtualenv 

For older versions of Ubuntu

• Install Easy Install

  $ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential 
  

• Install pip

  $ sudo easy_install pip 
  

• Install virtualenv

  $ sudo pip install --upgrade virtualenv 
  

3. Install virtualenv

pip install virtualenv

4. Activate virtualenv

$ mkdir hellodjango && cd hellodjango

$ virtualenv venv --distribute
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing distribute...............done.
Installing pip...............done. 

5. Install Django psycopg2 dj-database-url

$ pip install Django psycopg2 dj-database-url

In this step, you might get 

Error: pg_config executable not found. 

To solve this

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev python-dev

then

$ pip install Django psycopg2 dj-database-url
 

6. Initiate new project and run server

$ django-admin.py startproject hellodjango .

$ python manage.py runserver
Validating models...

0 errors found
Django version 1.4, using settings 'hellodjango.settings'
Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C. 

7. Install South

South is an open source package for model migration management for django. Without it, django itself can only add fied to models but not modifying. 

8. Create a Pip requirements file

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt