Django on Zeit Now in 30 minutes

4 min readMar 13, 2019

Zeit Now is a slick wrapper around AWS Lambda that makes getting simple web-apps up and running a matter of running a single command — now.

This guide will help you get a barebones Django application working by taking advantage of a custom Now builder for python WSGI applications: @ardnt/now-python-wsgi.

At Ardent, we’re using the builder to experiment with Now for a handful of public APIs that were built for Lambda, so you can expect it to mature along with Zeit until an official WSGI builder becomes available.

tl;dr: To cut to the chase, you can see a previous version of this tutorial along with the finished project on GitHub.

The plan

Set up a barebones Django application
Install the Now command-line tools
Configure your project for Now
Deploy!

1. Set up a barebones Django application

For the sake of example, we’ll work with what Django gives us out of the box with minimal additions.

Start a new Django project:

$ mkdir now-django-example && cd now-django-example
$ pip install Django
$ django-admin startproject now_app .

This establishes a new Django project in now-django-example/. I’m skipping over any environment management, assuming you have your own preferences (but check out direnv if you’re in the market).

Your project needs to be compatible with the python 3.6 runtime. Take care when you’re establishing your environment to select the right python version.

Add an app to the project:

$ python manage.py startapp example_app

This creates a stubbed application in now-django-example/example_app.

Update your project settings to include the new app by adding 'example_app' to the end of the INSTALLED_APPS list:

And update your project URLs to include URLs from the new app:

Create a view and route

Within the example_app app, create a single view and route. First, a simple view in views.py:

And our route in urls.py:

Check our progress

You now have a functioning Django application. You can test it out by starting up the development server and navigating to http://localhost:3000/:

$ python manage.py runserver

Step 1 complete! 🎉

2. Install the Now command-line tools

Our next order of business is to get linked up to Zeit Now. The folks at Zeit have created a set of command line tools, similar to Serverless, that you need for managing your projects.

Create a Zeit account

If you haven’t already yet, create a Zeit account at https://zeit.co/signup. You’ll be taken through a brief onboarding, all of which you can skip except for the initial step of choosing a username.

Install the Now toolchain

The desktop app offers a slick experience and includes the command line tools you’ll need to deploy. Download and install the appropriate version from https://zeit.co/download.

You’re now nearly ready to deploy! 👏

3. Configure your project for Now

There are three chores to take care of before you’re ready for deployment: adding a Now configuration, fixing some settings, and listing our dependencies.

Add a Now configuration

First, and most importantly, add a Now configuration file, now.json, to the root of your project:

This configuration does a few things:

"version": 2 tells Now that you’re using a version 2 configuration.
"name": "now-django-example" gives a name to our project. Feel free to change this to whatever your like.
Under "builds", "src": "now_app/wsgi." points to the file that contains a WSGI application declaration (Django created it for you).
"use": "@ardnt/now-python-wsgi" tells Now to use the @ardnt/now-python-wsgi builder. The latest version of the builder will be installed from NPM when you deploy our project during the build step.
"config": { "maxLambdaSize": "15mb" } increases the size limit of our bundle (the default is 5MB) — this may not be necessary, but Django is a large package, so it saves a headache if size becomes an issue. Feel free to experiment with the appropriate upper limit.
"routes": [ ... ] rewrites all routes ("src": "/(.*)") to our WSGI application ("dest": "now_app/wsgi.py") to be handled.

Update your Django settings

Next, you’ll need to adjust two Django project settings.

First, update ALLOWED_HOSTS to allow now.sh to be a valid hostname for your app.

Second, clear out your settings for DATABASES — this will prevent Django from searching for a database adapter (which is not available given the barebones nature of the Lambda compute environment).

Enumerate dependencies

Finally, you’ll need to list out dependencies in a requirements.txt file so that the Now builder knows what to install for you before deploying.

That’s it! You’re ready to go! 🍰

4. Deploy!

A little bit of configuration pays big dividends for your next step. To get a live working version of your app, all you need to do is run:

$ now

That’s it! After the build completes, your application will be available.

$ now
> Deploying now-django-example under jayhale
> Using project now-django-example
> https://now-django-example-kuv5rkvrz.now.sh [v2] [in clipboard]
┌ index.py        Ready               [18s]
└── λ index.py (636.23KB) [iad1]
> Success! Deployment ready [21s]