Anyone have good pointers on the best tools for continuous deployment of Django? I know there are tools like Capistrano, Fabric and Django Evolution out there but if someone has first hand experience using some of these it would be good to learn about.
One useful technique I've found is to have Fabric deploy to a "staging" install on the target server (we still use SVN). It runs unit tests in that install, and if the tests fail, it stops deployment. If they pass, fabric will then complete deployment to the production server (and run tests again for good measure).
Of course that depends on having good testing practices and coverage, but it helps reduce the number of stupid last-minute mistakes that creep into the repo. Fabric is also useful in numerous repetitive small tasks that you need to run without going through the rigamarole of SSH.
Generally though we avoid running South through Fabric - changes to data schema are run very carefully after backing up etc. South is great, but any migration tool should be used with due care.
South brings migrations to Django applications. Its main objectives are to provide a simple, stable and database-independent migration layer to prevent all the hassle schema changes over time bring to your Django applications.
