As a novice web developer, you've built your portfolio app and shared your code on GitHub. Perhaps, you're hoping to attract technical recruiters to land your first programming job. Many coding bootcamp graduates are likely doing the same thing. To differentiate yourself from the crowd and boost your chances of getting noticed, you can start hosting your Django project online.

For a hobby Django project, you'll want a hosting service that's free of charge, quick to set up, user-friendly, and well-integrated with your existing technology stack. While GitHub Pages is perfect for hosting static websites and websites with javascript, you'll need a web server to run your Flask or Django project.

There are a few major cloud platform providers operating in different models, but you're going to explore Heroku in this tutorial. It ticks all the boxes—it's free, quick to set up, user-friendly, and well-integrated with Django—and is the favorite cloud platform provider of many startups.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to:

Take your Django project online in minutes
Deploy your project to Heroku using Git
Use a Django-Heroku integration library
Hook your Django project up to a standalone relational database
Manage the configuration along with sensitive data