django deploying separate web & api endpoints on heroku

Question

I have a web application with an associated API and database.

I'd like to use the same Django models in the API, but have it served separately by different processes so I can scale it independently.

I also don't need the API to serve static assets, or any of the other views.

The complication is that the routes I have defined have the API and the webapp sharing the root domain:

http://domain.com/normal/application/stuff
http://domain.com/api/different/stuff

and additionally my Django apps depend on each other's models and constants (so two different settings.py files with different INSTALLED_APPS doesn't quite solve it).

I guess one way is I could define different processes in my Procfile which just start the Django app, but that in one of the processes it might have different environment variables? I don't think I can change the environment per Proc with heroku:config, I think it would actually have to be a directive in the Procfile.

Anyone have any experience or insight with this? Thanks!

Answer 1

As Daniel said you could just use two settings files, with a shared base. If you want to serve a subset of the urls you should just also create separate url definitions in the ROOT_URLCONF setting.

So your project structure would be something like this:

project/
    project/
       settings/
           __init__.py
           base.py
           normal.py
           api.py
       urls/
           __init__.py
           base.py
           normal.py
           api.py
       wsgi/
           __init__.py
           normal.py
           api.py

settings/normal.py (analog for api) would be somthing like this:

from .base import *
ROOT_URLCONF = 'project.urls.normal