vagrant-django-template

A template for new Django 1.5 projects developed under Vagrant. Features offered include:

• A Vagrantfile for building an Ubuntu Precise based VM
• A virtualenv (configured to be active on login), with project dependencies managed through a requirements.txt file
• A PostgreSQL database (with the same name as the project, pre-configured in the project settings file)
• Separation of configuration settings into base.py, dev.py and production.py (and optionally local.py, kept outside of version control) as per http://www.sparklewise.com/django-settings-for-production-and-development-best-practices/
• South, django-devserver, django-compressor, django-debug-toolbar out of the box
• A boilerplate base template with jquery included, and various other ideas and best practices borrowed from https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate

Setup

Install Django 1.5 on your host machine. (Be sure to explicitly uninstall earlier versions first, or use a virtualenv - having earlier versions around seems to cause pre-1.4-style settings.py and urls.py files to be generated alongside the new ones.)

To start a new project, run the following commands:

django-admin.py startproject --template https://github.com/torchbox/vagrant-django-template/zipball/master --name=Vagrantfile myproject
cd myproject
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
  (then, within the SSH session:)
./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

This will make the app accessible on the host machine as http://localhost:8111/ . The codebase is located on the host machine, exported to the VM as a shared folder; code editing and Git operations will generally be done on the host.

See also

https://github.com/torchbox/vagrant-django-base - a recipe for a Vagrant base box that can be used in place of precise32 in the Vagrantfile - this has more of the server setup baked in, so that we can save time by not having to re-run those steps every time we create a new VM instance.