Kick-start your Django and AngularJS based web applications in minutes. Your project will be deployed on Heroku so you can focus on building apps and not infrastructure.

The project provides a minimal set of useful libraries to get you started as quickly as possible. Specific topics are covered by recipes.

What you get:

• Django backend providing a REST API.
• AngularJS client including Restangular and UI Router.
• Architecture following the the twelve-factor app methodology.
• Configured Heroku environment including logging and monitoring.
• Everything is built on Heroku - No need to commit build artifacts to your repository.

• Installed Python and Virtualenv in a unix-style environment. See this guide for guidance.
• An installed version of Postgres to test locally. Also create a user and database for your project.
• Installed Node.js.
• Installed Grunt and Bower.
• Installed Compass.
• Installed Heroku Toolbelt.
• A Heroku user account. Signup is free and instant.

mkdir myproject && cd $_
wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/djng/djng-init/master/djng.sh | bash

Make sure you like what's inside djng.sh.

Watch for changes in your client:

cd client
grunt watch

Run the django development server:

source venv/bin/activate
cd server
python manage.py runserver_plus

If you want to execute your local development environment in the same manner as the remote environment you can use Foreman (it’s installed automatically by the Heroku Toolbelt) to run your Procfile-backed app.

Build your client:

cd client
grunt build

Set DJANGO_DEBUG=False in server/.env and collect the static files:

cd server
./manage.py collectstatic --noinput

Run foreman:

foreman start -e server/.env

This ensures that incompatibilities and hard to find bugs are caught before deploying to production and treats the application as a holistic unit instead of a series of individual commands working independently.

Add files, commit all your changes and push to heroku:

git add .
git commit -m 'your changes'
git push heroku master

This section covers the setup project process as done by djng-init, the interaction between the client and the server and the Heroku deployment.

Virtualenv is used to create an isolated Python environment for the Django server. The requirements are kept in requirements.txt and requirements_dev.txt:

virtualenv venv –no-site-packages
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements_dev.txt

All environment specific configurations for Django are located in server/.env:

$ cat serve.env
DJANGO_DEBUG=True
DJANGO_SECRET=SUPER_SECRET
DATABASE_URL=postgres://DBUSER:DBPW@localhost/DBNAME
[email protected]
DJANGO_ADMINS=<John Doe> [email protected]
DJANGO_MANAGERS=<John Doe> [email protected]

This configuration is then used in the Django settings.py.

This environment is conveniently loaded by manage.py for local development. On Heroku this configuration is managed by config vars. This project uses the handy heroku-config plugin to manage the configuration.

All client dependencies are managed by npm and bower:

cd client
npm install
bower install

All static assets are served by WhiteNoise in production to keep things simple. During local development the files are served by the django.contrib.staticfile app directly from the client directory.

Note: As this is a SPA Django needs to catch all URLs handled by the client and return the index.html. Therefore this URL pattern has to come last in your urls.py as it would otherwise override all other url definitions.

This project uses heroku-buildpack-multi to run two buildpacks. One is heroku-buildpack-webapp-client to build the client and the other one is heroku-buildpack-python to run Django defined in .buildpacks:

$ heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-multi.git
$ cat .buildpacks
https://github.com/djng/heroku-buildpack-webapp-client.git
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-python.git