Chapter 21: Render a Geodjango app

Prerequisites

This chapter shall detail how to host your geodjango application on Render. This may not be the ideal procedure, but hosting will follow one or more of the following steps.

First, install the gunicon, whitenoise and psycopg2-binary packages.

pip install gunicorn whitenoise psycopg2-binary

Secondly, update your requirements.txt file as this is what Render will use to host your app.

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Configure settings.py

At the very top of your settings.py file, ensure the following packages have been called.

import os
import dj_database_url

Then, in your DATABASES variable, uncomment the default variable and replace it with this one.

'default': dj_database_url.config(
        default='sqlite:///db.sqlite3', # Fallback to SQLite for local development if DATABASE_URL isn't set
        conn_max_age=600,
        # engine='django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis', # Specify PostGIS engine
        # Optionally, set this if you want to use a specific URL from env, 
        # though dj_database_url usually handles this well
        # conn_health_checks=True, 
    )

You may indeed be asking why we should replace the former default variable values with what has been provided above. According to some web scroll, the new default variable values are what will ensure our app is hosted on Render.

Within your settings.py file, ensure that your ALLOWED_HOSTS variable is set to ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*'],

At the bottom of your settings.py file, add the following:

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles')
STATICFILES_STORAGE = "whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage"

Run migrations

We want the database to get updated with the latest changes. Therefore, first run python3 manage.py makemigrations and thereafter, python3 manage.py migrate.

Thereafter push your Django to Gihub.

Create postgres on Render

Geodjango requires Postgres to run and because of that, we will create a Postgres instance on Render.

Inside Render, click on New > Postgres.

Provide a unique Name.

Provide Database name.

Select the Region that will host your Postgres instance.

Leave PostgreSQL version at its default.

Select Free under Instance Type and click Create Database. Wait for your database to be created.

Create Django web service on Render

On Render, create New > Web Service.

Create a unique Name for your web service

Select a Region that will host your web service.

Leave Instance Type as free.

Next to Build Command, we shall provide our requirements.txt file. Use these values: pip install -r requirements.txt.

Under Start Command, use this: python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000.

For the Environment Variables, the Key and Value parameters will be as follows, respectively.

Key: PYTHON_VERSION Value: 3.10.12

DATABASE_URL: <your-postgres-internal-or-external-database-url>

For the DATABASE_URL, we shall use either the internal or external database url for the Postgres instance we created earlier. These values can be found in the Info tab of your Postgres instance on render.

Once satisfied, go ahead and deploy your django web service.

At the end of the deployment, a link will be provided at the very top. Here is our Pro GMO website. Unfortunately, the other hosted webpages showing the results of our questions couldn't be displayed.

Kindly leave me a comment on the Github Repo for this project if you manage, or have previously managed to host a Geodjango app on Render.