Test-Driven Development with Python, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Testing Deployment Using a Staging Site

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

Devops Borat

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.

You might be tempted to skip this chapter—there’s lots of daunting stuff in it, and maybe 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 sections of the book 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 ...