Getting started with Facebook App development on Heroku environment

I am currently working on setting up the work environment for Facebook App development on Heroku server using python as the development language.

The complete tutorial is at: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/facebook

On high level the steps involve:

1. Creating a new facebook app and checking the option for Heroku hosting.
2. This creates a new domain on Heroku for your app and installs your app there.
3. Now, you can 'git clone' the code on your local machine, make changes to the code and 'git push heroku master' to push changes back to the world.
4. Need to setup the local environment for testing:
1. This involves setting up the virtualenv for python. http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/

virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments. The basic problem being addressed is one of dependencies and versions, and indirectly permissions. Imagine you have an application that needs version 1 of LibFoo, but another application requires version 2. How can you use both these applications? If you install everything into /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (or whatever your platform’s standard location is), it’s easy to end up in a situation where you unintentionally upgrade an application that shouldn’t be upgraded.

Or more generally, what if you want to install an application and leave it be? If an application works, any change in its libraries or the versions of those libraries can break the application. Also, what if you can’t install packages into the global site-packages directory? For instance, on a shared host.  

In all these cases, virtualenv can help you. It creates an environment that has its own installation directories, that doesn’t share libraries with other virtualenv environments (and optionally doesn’t access the globally installed libraries either).

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Using Virtualenv:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10763440/how-to-install-python3-version-of-package-via-pip

virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 py3env
source py3env/bin/activate
pip install package-name

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Now locally test your changes before deploying on the server.

Next steps:

- https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python

- To be able to use Django here - https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django

- To be able to use a DB backend.