How to create Django project for beginners

How to create Django project for beginners

Django

• Django is a free and open source web framework.
• It is used by many sites, including Pinterest, PBS, Instagram, BitBucket, Washington Times, Mozilla, and more!
• Django was created in 2003 when the web developers at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper started using Python for their development.
• The fact that is originated at a newspaper is important!
• Because the original developers were surrounded by writers, good written documentation is a key part of Django!
• This means you have excellent references to check on the official Django docs!
• When encountering Django tutorials you will often read that you should create a virtual environment or an “venv”
• Let’s talk about what this is and how to use it!
• A virtual environment allows you to have a virtual installation of Python and packages on your computer.

Creating virtualenv:

• conda create --name myEnv django

You can then activate the environment:

• activate myEnv 

Now, anything installed with pip or conda when this environment is activated, will only be installed for this environment.
You can then deactivate the environment 

• deactivate myEnv

Or for normal python distributions:

• pip install django

When you install Django, it actually also installed a command line tool called:

• django-admin:
• django-admin startproject first_project

You will then get something that looks like this:

• __init__.py

This is a blank Python script that due to its special name let’s Python know that this directory can be treated as a package

• settings.py

This is where you will store all your project settings

• urls.py

This is a Python script that will store all the URL patterns for your project. Basically the different pages of your web application

]

• wsgi.py

This is a Python script that acts as the Web Server Gateway Interface. It will later on help us deploy our web app to production

• manage.py

This is a Python script that we will use a lot. It will be associates with many commands as we build our web app

Let’s use manage.py now:

python manage.py runserver

You will see a bunch of stuff but at the bottom you will see something like:

Django version 1.10.5, using settings 'first_project.settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
• Copy and paste that url into your browser
• http://127.0.0.1:8000
• You should now see your very first web page being locally hosted on your computer.