Host Django site in IIS

Django is a free, open source web framework written in the Python language.

A web framework is a software framework that provide a standard way to build web applications. It allows web developers to focus on developing the business requirements rather than reinventing the wheel every time for standard, secure web applications.

In this post we will create a django project and host it in IIS.

It is best practice to provide a dedicated environment for each Django project you create, it allows you to run different versions of django for different applications on the same machine. There are many options to manage environments within the Python ecosystem, we will use the Python's default package venv for managing environments.

Create django project

Following are the steps you need to create a django project.

To create a virtual environment for your project, open a new command prompt, navigate to the folder where you want to create your project and then run the following command:
```
	python -m venv myproject_env
```
In this exmaple, I have executed this command at c:\projects. Above command will create a virtual environment and you will see a new folder named myproject_env at the path where you executed this command.
Next, we need to activate the environment, run this command from the command prompt(from same path).
```
	.\myproject_env\Scripts\activate
```
We have setup our virtual envrionemnt.
Lets create a new directory named src.
```
	mkdir src 
```
We have src folder at c:\projects.
Move to src folder
```
	cd src
```
and install django by using this command.
```
    pip install Django
```
This will install the latest release of django.
Create a new django project (from command prompt at src folder),
```
	django-admin startproject myproject
```
Execute manage.py runserver command, it will start the django site with development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
```
	python manage.py runserver
```
Enter this url in browser and you will see django's default page rendered successfully.

Install and enable wfastcgi

wfastcgi:

wfastcgi.py provides a bridge between IIS and Python using WSGI and FastCGI. It can be used with any Python web application or framework that supports WSGI.

Run the following command to install wfastcgi
```
	pip install wfastcgi
```
After installing wfastcgi, we need to enable it using:
```
	wfastcgi-enable
```
Note that, you need to open command prompt will elevated privilege.

If the above command is executed successfully, it will display the output similar to this:
```
Applied configuration changes to section "system.webServer/fastCgi" 
    for "MACHINE/WEBROOT/APPHOST" 
    at configuration commit path "MACHINE/WEBROOT/APPHOST"
```