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copied!<p>"Best practices" are very context-dependent, so I won't claim my practices are best, just that they work for me. I work on mostly small sites, so no multiple-server deployments, CDNs etc. I do need to support Webfaction shared hosting deployment, as some clients need the cheapest hosting they can find. I do often have to deploy sites multiple times in different environments, so repeatable scripted deploys are critical.</p> <ul> <li>I don't use pip bundles, I install from a requirements.txt. I do run my own <a href="http://github.com/ask/chishop" rel="nofollow noreferrer">chishop</a> server with sdists of everything I need, so there aren't multiple single points of failure in the build process. I also use PIP_DOWNLOAD_CACHE on my development machines to speed up bootstrapping project environments, since most of my projects' requirements overlap quite a bit.</li> <li>I have <a href="http://fabfile.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Fabric</a> scripts that can automatically set up and configure nginx + Apache/mod_wsgi on an Ubuntu VPS, or configure the equivalent on <a href="http://webfaction.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Webfaction</a> shared hosting, and then deploy the project.</li> <li>I do not use --no-site-packages with virtualenv, because I prefer having slow-moving compiled packages (Python Imaging Library, psycopg2) installed at the system level; too slow and troublesome to do inside every virtualenv. I have not had trouble with polluted system site-packages, because I generally don't pollute it. And in any case, you can install a different version of something in the virtualenv and it will take precedence.</li> <li>Each project has its own virtualenv. I have some bash scripts (not <a href="http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/virtualenvwrapper/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">virtualenvwrapper</a>, though a lot of people use that and love it) that automate deploying the virtualenv for a given project to a known location and installing that project's requirements into it.</li> <li>The entire deployment process, from a bare Ubuntu server VPS or Webfaction shared hosting account to a running website, is scripted using Fabric.</li> <li>Fabric scripts are part of the project source tree, and I run them from a local development checkout.</li> <li>I have no need for SCons (that I am aware of).</li> </ul> <h2>Deployment</h2> <p>At the moment a fresh deployment is split into these steps:</p> <ul> <li><code>fab staging bootstrap</code> (server setup and initial code deploy)</li> <li><code>fab staging enable</code> (enable the Apache/nginx config for this site)</li> <li><code>fab staging reload_server</code> (reload Apache/nginx config).</li> </ul> <p>Those can of course be combined into a single command line <code>fab staging bootstrap enable reload_server</code>.</p> <p>Once these steps are done, updating the deployment with new code is just <code>fab staging deploy</code>.</p> <p>If I need to roll back an update, <code>fab staging rollback</code>. Nothing particularly magical in the rollback; it just rolls back the code to the last-deployed version and migrates the database to the previous state (this does require recording some metadata about the migration state of the DB post-deploy, I just do that in a text file).</p> <h2>Examples</h2> <p>I haven't used the Fabric scripts described in this answer for a few years, so they aren't maintained at all and I disclaim responsibility for their quality :-) But you can see them at <a href="https://bitbucket.org/carljm/django-project-template" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://bitbucket.org/carljm/django-project-template</a> - in <code>fabfile.py</code> in the repo root, and in the <code>deploy/</code> subdirectory.</p>

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