Django testing environment

Question

I have deployed several Django-driven sites, mostly "concept" stuff; nothing serious. Now I'm ready to deploy a real-deal site (for my brother's medical practice), and would like to ensure that I'm doing it correctly.

My central concern, is the testing environment. I had been doing it by maintaining two separate folders with different Mercurial copies of a site, then updating the development branch, merging with the release branch, and then uploading to the server (Webfaction).

How do you manage testing environment for your Django projects?

Answer 1

All development is done on my local machine. I use virtualenv (and virtualenvwrapper) for the multiple projects. With virtualenv, you can have several versions of the same software without having to 'break' other code that may depend on a certain version. I use pip for downloading the proper libraries/applications into these separate environments. For each project (and therefore environment), I have a mercurial repository. If the new development passes all unit tests and works as expected, I send it up to the VCS. Once in the VCS, the code gets reviewed by colleagues.