Django testing environment

I have deployed several Django-driven sites, mostly "concept" stuff; nothing serious. Now I'm ready to deploy a real-deal开发者_如何学编程 site (for my brother's medical practice), and would like to ensure that I'm doing it correctly.

My central concern, is the testing environment. I had been doing it by maintaining two separate folders with different Mercurial copies of a site, then updating the development branch, merging with the release branch, and then uploading to the server (Webfaction).

How do you manage testing environment for your Django projects?

All development is done on my local machine. I use virtualenv (and virtualenvwrapper) for the multiple projects. With virtualenv, you can have several versions of the same software without having to 'break' other code that may depend on a certain version. I use pip for downloading the proper libraries/applications into these separate environments. For each project (and therefore environment), I have a mercurial repository. If the new development passes all unit tests and works as expected, I send it up to the VCS. Once in the VCS, the code gets reviewed by colleagues.