Re: Deployment Conundrum

On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 3:37 PM, Daniel Braun <dbraun86@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I'm working in a non-profit organization. It's a design archive and research institute based in Israel.

We're developing (me actually, the only developer) a Django website to replace our ASP/MS-Access horrible system.

To the point - the only server I am allocated by the IT department is a Windows 2008 server.

I'm currently working with Heroku, and needless to say, deployment is a breeze.

(Would love to stay with it, except I don't have the budget to pay for heroku/s3)

I realize I can run apache as a server, or even IIS. But how do I go about replicating heroku's deployment process (with git)?

Well, it depends what you mean by replicating Heroku.

If you just mean "getting a website up and running", then all you need is a git checkout of your source code, a web server configuration that points at that checkout, and a Python environment that can be called from the web server. I can't provide much specific advice here, but mod_wsgi configuration should be mostly standard regardless of the operating system, and it's not *that* hard to get working. Google has plenty of hits for "Django deployment windows"; you should be able to cobble something together from those links.

Once you've got your configuration working, redeploying should just be a matter of refreshing your git checkout and restarting/reloading the web server. It might be worthwhile writing some scripts to automate the update procedure, but worse case, it should only be a couple of commands.

If you want all the nifty auto scaling stuff that Heroku does -- that's another issue entirely. *That* sort of functionality means you need to have a deep understanding of your hosting environment. I don't think there are going to be any simple solutions here.

Is it viable to install a Ubuntu server virtual machine on top of the Windows installation? Does anyone have experience with it?

Is it possible? Yes. Will it perform as well as a native web server running on the native platform? No. Will the different between native and VM matter? That depends.

Whether this is a viable approach really depends on how comfortable you are with Unix vs Windows, and how much traffic you're actually going to serve. If you're going to serve a *lot* of traffic, then you probably want to avoid virtualisation - every little bit of extra performance will help. However, if you're only serving a handful of pages to a small internal group, then the overhead doesn't really matter -- If you've only got three people visiting your site, you could probably run the site on a Commodore 64 and still have CPU cycles to spare :-)

Yours,

Russ Magee %-)

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