Note The following chapter can be sometimes a bit hard to get through. Persist and finish it; deployment is an important part of the website development process. This chapter is placed in the middle of the tutorial so that your mentor can help with the slightly trickier process of getting your website online. This means you can still finish the tutorial on your own if you run out of time.

Until now, your website was only available on your computer. Now you will learn how to deploy it! Deploying is the process of publishing your application on the Internet so people can finally go and see your app. :)

As you learned, a website has to be located on a server. There are a lot of server providers available on the internet, we're going to use PythonAnywhere. PythonAnywhere is free for small applications that don't have too many visitors so it'll definitely be enough for you now.

The other external service we'll be using is GitHub, which is a code hosting service. There are others out there, but almost all programmers have a GitHub account these days, and now so will you!

These three places will be important to you. Your local computer will be the place where you do development and testing. When you're happy with the changes, you will place a copy of your program on GitHub. Your website will be on PythonAnywhere and you will update it by getting a new copy of your code from GitHub.

Git

Note If you already did the Installation steps, there's no need to do this again – you can skip to the next section and start creating your Git repository.

Git is a "version control system" used by a lot of programmers. This software can track changes to files over time so that you can recall specific versions later. A bit like the "track changes" feature in word processor programs (e.g., Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer), but much more powerful.

Installing Git

Installing Git: Windows

You can download Git from git-scm.com. You can hit "next" on all steps except for two: in the step where it asks to choose your editor, you should pick Nano, and in the step entitled "Adjusting your PATH environment", choose "Use Git and optional Unix tools from the Windows Command Prompt" (the bottom option). Other than that, the defaults are fine. Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style line endings is good.

Do not forget to restart the command prompt or powershell after the installation finished successfully.

Installing Git: OS X

Download Git from git-scm.com and follow the instructions.

Note If you are running OS X 10.6, 10.7, or 10.8, you will need to install the version of git from here: Git installer for OS X Snow Leopard

Installing Git: Debian or Ubuntu

$ sudo apt install git

Installing Git: Fedora

$ sudo dnf install git

Installing Git: openSUSE

$ sudo zypper install git

• \
  Forgetting to create your PythonAnywhere API token.
• Making a mistake in your GitHub URL
• If you see an error saying "Could not find your settings.py", it's probably because you didn't manage to add all your files to Git, and/or you didn't push them up to GitHub successfully. Have another look at the Git section above
• If you previously signed up for a PythonAnywhere account and had an error with collectstatic, you probably have an older version of SQLite (eg 3.8.2) for your account. In that case, sign up for a new account and try the commands in the PythonAnywhere section above.

If you see an error when you try to visit your site, the first place to look for some debugging info is in your error log. You'll find a link to this on the PythonAnywhere "Web" page. See if there are any error messages in there; the most recent ones are at the bottom.

There are also some general debugging tips on the PythonAnywhere help site.

And remember, your coach is here to help!

Check out your site!

The default page for your site should say "It worked!", just like it does on your local computer. Try adding /admin/ to the end of the URL, and you'll be taken to the admin site. Log in with the username and password, and you'll see you can add new Posts on the server -- remember, the posts from your local test database were not sent to your live blog.

Once you have a few posts created, you can go back to your local setup (not PythonAnywhere). From here you should work on your local setup to make changes. This is a common workflow in web development – make changes locally, push those changes to GitHub, and pull your changes down to your live Web server. This allows you to work and experiment without breaking your live Web site. Pretty cool, huh?

Give yourself a HUGE pat on the back! Server deployments are one of the trickiest parts of web development and it often takes people several days before they get them working. But you've got your site live, on the real Internet!