This blog post is based on From Project to Productionized, a talk given at PyCon 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can use this post today to learn how to deploy a Python application on Heroku. More specifically, we’ll show you how to deploy Django apps, including setting up your Django configuration, building continuous delivery pipelines, adding middleware, and everything else that goes into deploying Django on Heroku.

If you’d prefer a generic guide explaining how to deploy a Python application on Heroku, check out Getting Started on Heroku with Python.

Today, we're thrilled to host Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Jacob's a former Herokai and long-time core contributor to Django, and he's here to share an in-depth look at something that he believes will define the future of the framework.

Django Channels allows Python developers to build real-time, asynchronous web apps with Python and JavaScript. It augments Django’s robust response-request architecture with asynchronous protocol handling, including WebSockets support. In this Django Channels tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a real-time chat app with Django, Channels, Redis, and Heroku Dynos.

What are Django Channels?

When Django was created, almost 20 years ago, the web was a...

A big update to the beloved Python web framework known as Django was released recently: Django 1.9. This release contains a long list of improvements for everything from the graphical styling of the admin to the ability to run your test suite in parallel.

Our favorite improvements to the framework were, of course, all about our favorite database: Postgres. Here are some of the highlights from the official release notes (highly recommended reading).

Renamed PostgreSQL Back-end

Django's fantastic built-in Postgres database back-end received a nice name change. Previously known as django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2, the back-end will now be officially available as the much easier...

[Heroku Connect] [heroku_connect] is written primarily in Python using Django. It's an add-on and a platform app, meaning it's built on the Heroku platform. Part of our interface provides users with a realtime dashboard, so we decided to take advantage of socket.io and node.js for websocket communication. But like all Heroku apps, only one type of dyno can serve traffic. This left us with two choices: manage 2 apps, each with its own repo, and carefully consider when and how we deployed them, or find a way to serve both node and Django traffic from the same app.