Deployment of web applications has many considerations. Most web applications must handle sensitive data. To handle increased traffic, the app should be scalable. If a crash occurs in the app, no data should be lost. These are only a few things that need to be considered. Twelve-factor applications address a lot of these issues, and I’ll show how to make a Django web application behave as a twelve-factor app.

The twelve-factor application methodology is a pattern popularized by Heroku with an aim to handle many of the biggest considerations in web application deployment. Twelve-factor applications operate differently from a more traditional web application. In a traditional environment, the state of the system is often baked in to the deployed software. This state could include information like:

• database connections
• routes to other services such as Memcached
• tokens to connect with external services like Stripe

Including this kind of data in the web application reduces its flexibility and is potentially unsafe as it essentially stores secrets in the app.

In contrast, a twelve-factor app is stateless. All state and configuration that can change dynamically is injected via environment variables. By pushing the environment settings to environment variables, a twelve-factor app can be deployed to a variety of environments merely by changing settings. Do you want to deploy your app to a staging environment and a production environment? Change the environment variables and your app is now configured for the new setting!

The decoupling of state from function unlocks a number of new possibilities.

• With great ease, a team can scale their application horizontally by increasing the number of application servers to handle additional load.
• Apps can migrate to new environments quickly. Because the applications are stateless, they can be discarded in an old environment and provisioned again in a new environment without losing data.

There are other benefits documented on the twelve-factor app website and I strongly suggest that you read it to see some of the other ideas for these kinds of applications.

12-factor and Django

I’ve worked on a few Django apps in my career. These apps have mostly not been twelve-factor apps, but my latest project, College Conductor, uses the twelve-factor app pattern. A Django app requires very little extra work to make it a twelve-factor app. The biggest change comes to the Django settings.py file.

Python exposes environment variables through the os.environ dictionary. Using a twelve-factor Django app means wiring the environment variables to the Django settings.

For instance, the SECRET_KEY setting should not be checked into source control. The SECRET_KEY can be set like:

import os

SECRET_KEY = os.environ['SECRET_KEY']

This is boring code at its finest. The cool part about this code is how it declares its intent. By not providing a default value, the app will fail to start unless the SECRET_KEY environment variable is defined. This is an oddly good quality. Since the variable is required, it forces the deployment environment to be complete. When all the dynamic configuration is set this way, you can have high confidence that you have all the necessary configuration.

Twelve-factor apps are not without downsides. Because everything must be declared in environment variables, the standard ./manage.py runserver will not work immediately. In fact, any ./manage.py command will fail to function without some configuation. To fix this, I use Honcho, a Python port of Foreman. Honcho provides tools for working on twelve-factor apps. With Honcho, users define a Procfile to determine which commands to run to start an environment. Here’s an example:

web: python manage.py runserver

When this file is defined, you can run honcho start to launch the commands. Even though this seems as likely to break as before, Honcho takes an extra step of looking for environment variables set in a .env file. The .env file uses a format like:

SECRET_KEY='itsasecrettoeverybody'

For any variable set in the file, that variable is loaded as an environment variable.

Honcho also includes a run command for one-off commands. This command does the same loading of .env as the start command.

$ honcho run python manage.py migrate

Even though twelve-factor apps require extra work, I believe that the benefits that come from using them are very valuable. With the os module and an extra tool, you can quickly produce a working twelve-factor Django app for your environment. If you do, I hope you see the same benefits that I’ve seen.