At Blimp, we love working with Django. For every project we start we always ended up doing the same thing. Installing Django, setting up environment settings, installing South, etc... So I decided to take all of that and create a Django Project Template to use with the startproject command new in Django 1.4. This template has a couple of useful settings and Fabric commands that make deploying, managing, and using Django with Heroku easier.
#How to install
django-admin.py startproject --template=https://github.com/jpadilla/django-project-template/zipball/master --extension=py,md,dev project_name
#Apps included Fabric South dj-database-url django-extensions gunicorn psycopg2
#Settings
The manage.py script checks for an environment variable called ENVIRONMENT with values of STAGING or PRODUCTION. If none of those are found, development environment is assumed. We use this to automatically set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. This makes using manage.py easier because you dont have to keep remembering of writing --setting=project.settings.development. We converted settings.py into a module with settings splitted into three different files, development.py, staging.py, production.py. All of those import common settings from common.py and override them or set new ones depending on the environment.
#Fabric Script
##Environments fab development 'command' fab staging 'command' fab production 'command'
##Deployment fab production deploy fab production collectstatic fab brunchwatch fab brunchbuild
##DB fab staging resetdb fab schemamigration fab migrate fab updatedb
##Heroku fab production ps fab production restart fab production tail fab production shell fab production config