[box type=”warning”]Since I created this post things broke. Namely checking out the latest versions of the Chef cookbooks introduced a whole rat’s nest of dependencies. I spent a day trying to figure them out, but finally decided to just do provisioning via a shell script.

The repository has been updated so the latest version uses the new shell script. If you want the Chef version, it was tagged “v1WChef”.
[/box]

In a previous post I talked about how to do WordPress Development right by using Vagrant to create a virtual machine to do your development in.

I’ve been wanting to improve my Django skills and have a project I want to use it for, so I plan to use the same principle and do my Django coding in a VM using Vagrant.

Figuring out how to do this quickly, easily and reliably was more complicated than I expected. I owe a great debt to Smiley Creatives’ article “SETUP A DJANGO VM WITH VAGRANT, VIRTUALBOX, AND CHEF” and a comment by juanje on how to create a Chef cookbook to install Django.

My goal was to create something where I could run a script and have a whole new development environment for Django set up.

The Vagrant Django Script

If you don’t care how it works, but just want to use it, then do these steps.

1. Clone the repository to your machine.

I’ve created a git repository on bitbucket.org with all the files you need. Just execute this command.

This will create a folder on your machine. This folder is not where you are going to run Vagrant from. Rather it is a source folder for creating another folder to run Vagrant from and do your Django development.

2. Create a Target Folder

Make a directory for your development. Note the path to that directory.For our purposes, we’ll assume you want this directory to be next to the directory just created by the git clone command in step 1.

3. Run the Create Django VM Script

In the folder that was created by git you will find a script ‘create_django_vm.py’. Execute this script with the path to the directory you created in step 2.

If you look in the new directory you’ll see something like this:

You have a new Vagrantfile, a folder full of Chef cookbooks, and a django_shared folder that will be shared with the VM.

4. Move To Your New Directory and Vagrant Up

That’s it, you are ready to go.

That’s it. There will be a bunch of Vagrant launching text, but when it’s finished you can:

You’ll find a directory in your home directory named “django_shared”. This is the same as the folder “django_shared” in the directory you just vagrant sshed from.

From here you can do all your django commands on your VM. Edit the files on your host OS, and view the app via your browser.

Running Django On Your VM

Let’s make sure our development environment is able to run Django by duplicating the first steps of the Django Tutorial.

Once you are logged in:

First we move into our shared directory, then we create a new Django project with the django-admin.py script. Then move into the newly created app folder and run the server.

Now go back to your browser and point it to http://localhost:8000/ and you should get the standard Django welcome.

A special note about the runserver command on your VM. You can’t just use the default ‘manage.py runserver’ because the VM won’t let that be shared. Instead you must tell it to run the server on 0.0.0.0:8000 to let it be seen outside the VM

I think the code that makes all this happen is well documented, so I won’t go over it all here. Let me know if you use this script and how you like it.