3. Deploy your application to the Divio Cloud#

One further step is required before the application can be deployed to the cloud. Django’s ALLOWED_HOSTS setting controls the hosts that are allowed to serve the application. When undefined, localhost is allowed by default, which will work locally, but not in a cloud deployment.

The quick solution is to amend settings.py to allow any host:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']

Normally, this is not something you would do in production. However it will suffice for now and we will refine it later.

The application is now in a state where it can be deployed to the cloud. All the files that define the application should be committed and pushed. It’s always good to exclude unwanted files from Git before you commit them inadvertently, so add some new patterns to the application’s .gitignore file:

# macOS
.DS_Store
.DS_Store?
._*
.Spotlight-V100
.Trashes

# Python
*.pyc
*.pyo
db.sqlite3

# Divio
.divio
/data.tar.gz

(.divio is used by the Divio CLI to refer to the correct cloud application; /data.tar.gz is created by the CLI when pulling a database from the cloud. Neither should be committed to the repository.)

Now it’s safe to commit the application files you have been working on:

git add .gitignore Dockerfile docker-compose.yml manage.py myapp requirements.txt
git commit -m "Defined basic application components"
git push

On the application Dashboard, you will see that your new commit is listed, and that it now reports 3 Undeployed commits. You can deploy the Test environment using the Control Panel, or by running:

divio app deploy

Once you have successfully deployed the Test environment, the Control Panel will indicate this in the interface with a Last deployment successful message and the application URL in the Test environment pane will display as a link, for example https://tutorial-project-stage.us.aldryn.io. Select the link to access the application.


Your Django application is now running in the cloud as well as locally, but it can’t do anything useful until it is attached to basic services, such as the database and media storage. In the next sections we will take care of:

  • database storage

  • static asset compilation, storage and serving

  • media storage and serving