Learn how to deploy a production-ready Django application into a Kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes is a tool to manage containers. This type of management is called orchestration because it does more than just manage the containers such as it will scale up and scale down resources as needed (among many other things).

Since Kubernetes is a massive tool, we're going to be covering a practical implementation using a Docker-based Django application.

Django is a way to build web applications rapidly using Python. There are many ways to get Django into production so the question is why use K8S at all? There's many reasons we'll cover throughout this series but here are a few:

• Gracefully deploy Docker-based Django projects
• Scale up (or scale down) your web apps with ease
• Use a few or a lot of microservices internally or externally
• Self-heal when services go down
• Simplify app deployment (after initial configuration)
• Streamline your backend Infrastructure (provision virtual machines and let k8s do the rest)

Kubernetes can do a lot which makes it a great tool to learn but also a daunting one at that. To make it more approachable here's what we'll be doing:

• Start a Python Virtual Environment
• Create a bare bones production-ready Django project
• Create a Dockerfile to describe our environment (much like this blog post)
• Use a managed Database service from DitgitalOcean
• Install Kubernetes locally
• Start a Kubernetes Cluster on DigitalOcean
• Provision a Deployment and Service for our Django project
• Implement Github Action Workflows to automate future deployments

• Django on Docker guide
• Docker & Docker Compose tutorial series
• Github Actions guide
• DigitalOcean $100 credit for new accounts
• Code

We have partnered with DigitalOcean to bring you this series. Sign up for an account when you're ready to get started with this series.

Make sure you create web/.env and fill in the following variables:

DEBUG=1
REGION=texas
DJANGO_SUPERUSER_USERNAME=admin
DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD=mydjangopw
[email protected]
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=fix_this_later

POSTGRES_READY=0
POSTGRES_DB=dockerdc
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mysecretpassword
POSTGRES_USER=myuser
POSTGRES_HOST=localhost
POSTGRES_PORT=5434

REDIS_HOST=redis_db
REDIS_PORT=6388

If you change POSTGRES_PORT or REDIS_PORT be sure to update those values in docker-compose.yaml

Once you have the above .env file, navigate to your project root (right where docker-compose.yaml is) and run:

docker compose up -d

This will create a postgresql database that's running in the background for you. To bring this database down just run:

docker compose down

The data in the database will be persistent so you can run docker compose up -d again with confidence.

Also in the root of your project:

python3.9 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r web/requirements.txt

This will ensure your Django project is ready to be used locally.