Deploying Django application with SQL Database to Azure

I was running into this same issue with the pyodbc package when using the Linux version. I was using the Windows based web-app but had to rebuild from scratch and accidentally selected the Linux version.

Once switching back to the Windows version I used python 3.6 and followed these steps, (based on this blog for deploying a flask app, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pythonengineering/2016/08/04/upgrading-python-on-azure-app-service/):

Deploy a Django web-app to Azure

1. In the portal click on "Web App">"New"
2. Give the web app a name: <webappname>
3. Set the resource group to be the same as the database
4. Select the OS to be Windows
5. Click, deploy - This will take few minutes to deploy
6. Once deployed you can click on the URL https://<webappname>.azurewebsites.net to see a default azure web page
7. In your Django project go to settings.py and in the "ALLOWED_HOSTS" add ".azurewebsites.net".
8. In the Azure portal>webapp, go to Extensions and install python3.6 x64
9. In Portal > webapp > Application settings, select "Always on".
10. In settings.py set:
    • DEBUG = os.getenv('DJANGO_DEBUG') != 'FALSE'
    • also set other private variables as environment variables (these should then be added as key-value pairs (e.g. DJANGO_DEBUG = FALSE) in Portal>webapp>Application settings>Application settings.
11. Also, to connect to the SQL database set the database settings to be:
    • OPTIONS[driver] = 'SQL Server Native Client 11.0'
    • OPTIONS[MARS_Connection] = 'True'
12. Make sure you have the following files in the base directory of your django project:
    • ptvs_virtual_proxy.py
    • .SkipPythonDeployment
    • web.config make sure you have key="DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE" value "<django-project-name>.settings" (see below)
13. In your local project, Run pip freeze and put the contents into requirements.txt (see below)
14. Check that all migration files have been added to git by running git status
15. Commit and push the changes to your git repo
16. In the portal, in your new web-app go to "Deployment options"
17. "Choose Source" -> Follow the steps and click "Finish/Ok" to see the deployment progress and view the logs
18. Once deployment says "Success", Go to Kudu (http://<webappname>.scm.azurewebsites.net)>Powershell, and run D:\home\python364x64\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade -r D:\home\site\wwwroot\requirements.txt, This should hopefully be successful and only needs to be rerun when you update a package.

19. Then go back to "Deployment Center" and click on the logs button, and click redeploy, you may also need to restart the web-app to update the environment variables (go to webapp>overview>restart).

20. For static files, either commit all the admin files after running locally python manage.py collectstatic or you can setup static files like this, then run D:\home\python364x64\python.exe D:\home\site\wwwroot\manage.py collectstatic in Kudu)

web.config file:

<configuration>
<appSettings>
    <add key="WSGI_HANDLER" value="<django-project-name>.wsgi.application"/>
    <add key="PYTHONPATH" value="D:\home\site\wwwroot"/>
    <add key="WSGI_LOG" value="D:\home\LogFiles\wfastcgi.log"/>
    <add key="PYTHONPATH" value="D:\home\site\wwwroot" />
    <add key="DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE" value="<django-project-name>.settings" />
  </appSettings>
  <system.web>
    <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />
    <customErrors mode="Off" />
  </system.web>
  <system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
    <httpErrors errorMode="Detailed"></httpErrors>
    <handlers>
      <add name="PythonHandler" path="handler.fcgi" verb="*" modules="FastCgiModule" scriptProcessor="D:\home\python364x64\python.exe|D:\home\python364x64\wfastcgi.py" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script"/>
    </handlers>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="Static Files" stopProcessing="true">
          <conditions>
            <add input="true" pattern="false" />
          </conditions>
        </rule>
        <rule name="Configure Python" stopProcessing="true">
          <match url="(.*)" ignoreCase="false" />
          <conditions>
            <add input="{REQUEST_URI}" pattern="^/static/.*" ignoreCase="true" negate="true" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="Rewrite" url="handler.fcgi/{R:1}" appendQueryString="true" />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

requirements.txt file:

cycler==0.10.0
Django==1.11.15
django-pyodbc-azure==1.11.15.0
djangorestframework==3.6.3
djangorestframework-jsonp==1.0.2
pyodbc==4.0.25

please go to the scm site of your web app, then try to manually install the modules which throw the error.

For detailed steps, please refer to this article.