How to Deploy Django Website to Heroku with Gitlab CI/CD

3 min readJun 7, 2021

Django is a MVT (Model View Template) framework used for building web applications. It is simple, powerful, and have many built in features. Django is the first framework that I use to build a website. With Gitlab CI/CD, we can deploy our website with just pushing a git branch.

In this article, we will learn how to automate deployment to Heroku with Gitlab CI/CD. So here are the steps.

Step 1: Create Heroku app

To create a Heroku app, login to Heroku. If you don’t have an account, you need to create it first.

Create your app from Heroku dashboard. Your app-name determines your host name after it gets deployed, so choose wisely. If your app name is hello-world , your deployed website URL will hello-world.herokuapp.com .

Step 2: Create CI/CD script

This is the CI/CD script that I use for my Gitlab project when deploying a Heroku app. The following CI/CD Script include 2 stages; test and deploy. You should create a new file named gitlab-ci.yml and write the following i

In the test stage, we run pip install -r requirements.txt to install python dependencies. And then python manage.py migrate to migrate any migrations to the models. python manage.py collectstatic is for moving and generating static files like images or javascript files to a static directory. Finally we run the test with python manage.py test or if you want to check the coverage, use coverage run manage.py test like above.

Step 3: Set environment variable

When deploying an app to Heroku, we need to have our account’s API key. To get the API key, go to Heroku’s account and you can find it at the bottom of the page.

This CI/CD script requires 3 variables, which are HEROKU_APP_NAME, HEROKU_API_KEY, and HEROKU_APP_HOST, because those strings were found in .gitlab-ci.yml and starts with a dollar sign ($). The dollar sign means it is a variable.

Now you need to set those variables in Gitlab Settings > CI/CD > Variables.

HEROKU_APP_NAME = <your app name>
HEROKU_API_KEY = <your account API key>
HEROKU_APP_HOST = <your host url>

For example:

HEROKU_APP_NAME = simpk
HEROKU_API_KEY = 01234567-abcd-1234
HEROKU_APP_HOST = simpk.herokuapp.com

Step 4: Install dependencies

Heroku needs gunicorn to run the website. And in most CI/CD, you also want to check for test code coverage. To install gunicorn and coverage, run the following command.

pip install gunicorn coverage

Step 5: Create required files

We need some prerequisite files to deploy a Django web app to Heroku:

Procfile
requirements.txt

Create a new file named Procfile in the project root directory and insert the following text:

release: python manage.py migrate
web: gunicorn simpk.wsgi --log-file -

Note that simpk is my project name, you should change it to your project name there.

To create requirements.txt , you just need to run this command:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Step 6: Modify settings.py

Add STATIC_ROOT variable to your

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles')

Change your ALLOWED_HOST to include your heroku app host URL (replace simpk with your Heroku app name).

ALLOWED_HOST = ['localhost', 'simpk.herokuapp.com']

Step 7: Enjoy

Finally, push any changes to your main branch.

git add .
git commit -m "deployment"
git push origin main

If everything goes as planned, after you push to your main branch, Gitlab will create a new running pipeline. If the pipeline succeeds, your website should be deployed in heroku. You can access your website in this URL format: <app-name>.herokuapp.com .

If you encounter an error during deployment, you should read the logs at Gitlab Repo > Pipelines or Heroku Dashboard > apps > More > View Logs.