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#Getting Started with Django

In this module, we will create our first Django Application that will display Hello World

Lesson 0 - Installing Django

To get started with Django, you need to install Django first.

If you have pip installed you can simply run pip install Django. Luckily, this has already been done on the codelearn server, so you don't need to bother about the installation process.

However, if you want to work on your local machine you can follow the instuctions here

Lesson 1 - Creating the Project

Once you have installed Django, django-admin.py will be added to your system path.

*django-admin.py *is Django’s command-line utility for administrative tasks. It will be used to create Django projects, handle database operations, run development server and do several other tasks which we'll dive into later modules.

To create your first Django project, goto the console and run

django-admin.py startproject django_blog

This will create a folder django_blog with the following structure. Here, django_blog is the name of our project.

A Django project is a collection of settings for an instance of Django, including database configuration, Django-specific options and application-specific settings.

├── django_blog
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   ├── wsgi.py
└── manage.py

These files are:

  • The outer django_blog/ directory is just a container for your project. Its name doesn't matter to Django; you can rename it to anything you like.
  • manage.py: A command-line utility that lets you interact with this Django project in various ways. It is a thin wrapper around django-admin.py. So inside a Django project you can run manage.py instead of django-admin.py.
  • The inner django_blog/ directory is the actual Python package for your project. Its name is the Python package name you'll need to use to import anything inside it (e.g. import mysite.settings).
  • django_blog/init.py: An empty file that tells Python that this directory should be considered a Python package.
  • django_blog/settings.py: Settings/configuration for this Django project. Django settings will tell you all about how settings work.
  • django_blog/urls.py: It handles the URL declarations for the Django project. This will simply map URL patterns (simple regular expressions) to Python functions (your views).
  • django_blog/wsgi.py: An entry-point for WSGI-compatible webservers to serve your project. This will be used, once we want to deploy our application for production. For now, we'll ignore it.

Now, that our project is setup. We can test it by running a development server.

The Django development server is a built-in, lightweight Web server you can use while developing your site. It’s included with Django so you can develop your site rapidly, without having to deal with configuring your production server (e.g., Apache) until you’re ready for production

Run this command inside Django project

python manage.py runserver

This will run a development server on port 8000. If you preview your app now you'll see a "Welcome to Django" page, in pleasant, light-blue pastel. It worked!

Lesson 2 - Creating the app

In this module, we'll create our first Django Application that will show a Hello World message instead of Weclome to Django.

To create our application, we'll run this command inside our Django project in the console.

python manage.py startapp blog

This will create a folder blog inside our project. The new file structure should look something like this.

├── blog
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── models.py
│   ├── tests.py
│   ├── views.py
├── django_blog
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   ├── wsgi.py
└── manage.py

Each Django application will consist of models.py, tests.py and views.py. For this module we'll only be dealing with views.py which shall be used to serve the content of our application.

Now open views.py for editing, replace its content with the following code

from django.http import HttpResponse


def home(request):
    return HttpResponse('<h1>Hello World</h1>')

This will create a home view for our application that simply returns Hello World.

Let's see how this works

  1. First, we import the class HttpResponse, which lives in the django.http module. We need to import this class because it’s used later in our code.
  2. We define home function, or home view. We can name this anything we want. As long as it is a valid python identifier. Every view function takes request as first parameter which contains details about the HTTP Request.
  3. We call HTTPResponse function to display our Hello World message.

Now that our view is ready, we need to tell our our django project when to serve this view. If you have been following closely, you can guess. We do this in django_blog/urls.py

Now, add the following python code below the comment on line 8

url(r'^$', 'blog.views.home'),

This shall be enough to tell our django project, to serve the home view in blog application when we visit the root url of the project.

You can test the same by running development server again.

python manage.py runserver

That is it, preview your application and you shall see the Hello World message.

That's it for this module. We'll get into models and get started with blog views in the next module.