Development with Python

CHAPTER 8

Testing Deployment Using a Staging Site

Is all fun and game until you are need of put it in production.

—

It’s time to deploy the first version of our site and make it public. They say that if you

wait until you feel ready to ship, then you’ve waited too long.

Is our site usable? Is it better than nothing? Can we make lists on it? Yes, yes, yes.

No, you can’t log in yet. No, you can’t mark tasks as completed. But do we really need

any of that stuff? Not really—and you can never be sure what your users are

actually

going to do with your site once they get their hands on it. We think our users want to

use the site for to-do lists, but maybe they actually want to use it to make “top 10 best

fly-fishing spots” lists, for which you don’t need any kind of “mark completed” function.

We won’t know until we put it out there.

In this chapter we’re going to go through and actually deploy our site to a real, live web

server.

Youmight be tempted to skip this chapter—there’s lots of daunting stuff in it, andmaybe

you think this isn’t what you signed up for. But I

strongly

urge you to give it a go. This

is one of the chapters I’m most pleased with, and it’s one that people often write to me

saying they were really glad they stuck through it.

If you’ve never done a server deployment before, it will demystify a whole world for

you, and there’s nothing like the feeling of seeing your site live on the actual Internet.

Give it a buzzword name like “DevOps” if that’s what it takes to convince you it’s

worth it.

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