To setup your local environment you should create a virtualenv and install the necessary requirements:

mkvirtualenv copelco --distribute
$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/pip install -r $PWD/requirements/dev.txt

Then create a local settings file and set your DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to use it:

cp copelco/settings/local.example.py copelco/settings/local.py
echo "export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=copelco.settings.local" >> $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postactivate
echo "unset DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE" >> $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postdeactivate

Create the Postgres database and run the initial syncdb/migrate:

createdb -E UTF-8 copelco
python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py migrate

You should now be able to run the development server:

python manage.py runserver

The first step in creating a new server is to create users on the remote server. You will need root user access with passwordless sudo. How you specify this user will vary based on the hosting provider. EC2 and Vagran use a private key file. Rackspace and Linode use a user/password combination. Before running this command you should add the ssh keys of the developers into the conf/users directory:

fab -H <fresh-server-ip> -u <root-user> create_users

This will create a project user and users for all the developers. At this time it's typically a good idea to lock down SSH connections disable password login and move the default port from 22 to env.ssh_port:

fab -H <fresh-server-ip> configure_ssh

Now the the base server is configured you should add the IP to appropriate environment function and provision it for its role. You can provision a new server with the setup_server fab command. It takes a list of roles for this server ('app', 'db', 'lb') or you can say 'all':

fab staging setup_server:all

You can test the provisioning/deployment using Vagrant. Using the Vagrantfile you can start up the VM. This requires the lucid32 box:

vagrant up

With the VM up and running you can create the necessary users as before. The location of the key file may vary on your system.:

fab -H 33.33.33.10 -u vagrant -i /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-1.0.2/keys/vagrant create_users
fab vagrant setup_server:all
fab vagrant deploy

It is not necessary to reconfigure the SSH settings on the vagrant box. This forwards port 80 in the VM to port 8080 on the host box. You can view the site by visiting localhost:8080 in your browser. You may also want to add:

33.33.33.10 dev.example.com

to your hosts (/etc/hosts) file. You can stop the VM with vagrant halt and destroy the box completely to retest the provisioning with vagrant destroy. For more information please review the Vagrant documentation.

For future deployments you can deploy changes to a particular environment with the deploy command. This takes an optional branch name to deploy. If the branch is not given, it will use the default branch defined for this environment in env.branch:

fab staging deploy
fab staging deploy:new-feature

New requirements or South migrations are detected by parsing the VCS changes and will be installed/run automatically.