How to Deploy Your Django Application on Heroku

4 min readApr 17, 2023

If you have developed a Django application and are ready to deploy it to the web, Heroku is an excellent choice. Heroku is a cloud-based platform that allows you to deploy and scale web applications easily. This article will walk you through the steps to deploy your Django application on Heroku.

Step 1: Create a Heroku Account

To start, you need to create a Heroku account if you don’t already have one. Head to Heroku’s website and click the “Sign up for free” button. Follow the steps to create your account.

Step 2: Install the Heroku CLI

Once you have created your account, you must install the Heroku CLI on your local machine. The Heroku CLI allows you to interact with Heroku from the command line. You can download the Heroku CLI from Heroku’s website.

Step 3: Create a Django Project

Before deploying our Django application, we need to create a Django project. You can skip this step if you have already created your Django project. Otherwise, follow these steps to create a Django project:

Open a command prompt or terminal window.
Navigate to the directory where you want to create your Django project.
Run the command django-admin startproject projectname. Replace projectname with the name you want to give your project.

Step 4: Prepare Your Django Application for Deployment

Before deploying our Django application to Heroku, we need to make a few changes to our project. Follow these steps to prepare your Django application for deployment:

Create a requirements.txt File in the root directory of your project. This file should contain a list of all the Python packages that your Django application requires. You can generate this file by running the command pip freeze > requirements.txt in your command prompt or terminal window.
Create a Procfile file in the root directory of your project. This file tells Heroku how to run your Django application. Add the following line to your Procfile: web: gunicorn projectname.wsgi --log-file -. Replace projectname with the name of your Django project.

Step 5: Create a Git Repository

Before deploying our Django application to Heroku, we must create a Git repository for our project. Follow these steps to create a Git repository:

Open a command prompt or terminal window.
Navigate to the root directory of your Django project.
Run the command git init.
Run the command git add ..
Run the command git commit -m "Initial commit".

Step 6: Create a Heroku App

Now that we have prepared our Django application for deployment and created a Git repository, we can create a Heroku app. Follow these steps to create a Heroku app:

Open a command prompt or terminal window.
Run the command heroku login and enter your Heroku credentials.
Run the command heroku create appname. Replace appname with the name, you want to give your Heroku app.

Step 7: Deploy Your Django Application

Now that we have created a Heroku app, we can deploy our Django application. Follow these steps to deploy your Django application:

Run the command git push heroku master.
Wait for the deployment process to complete.
Run the command heroku run python manage.py migrate to apply any pending database migrations.
Run the command heroku open to open your Django application in your web browser.

Congratulations! You have successfully deployed your Django application on Heroku.

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