Getting started

Verifying setup

Before we get started, let’s just make sure that Python and Django are installed correctly and are the appropriate versions.

Running the following command in the MacOS or Linux terminal or in the Windows command prompt should show the version of Python. For this workshop you should have a 2.6.x or 2.7.x version of Python.

$ python -V

You should also have pip installed on your machine, along with the requirements.txt file.

# In the same directory where you downloaded requirements.txt
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Hint

Things you should type into your terminal or command prompt will always start with $ in this workshop. Don’t type the leading $ though.

Running the next command will show the version of Django you have installed. For this workshop, a 1.5.x version is required. If instead you see a “No module named django” message, please follow the Django installation instructions.

$ python -c "import django; print(django.get_version())"

Creating the project

The first step when creating a new Django website is to create the project boilerplate files.

$ django-admin.py startproject myblog
$ cd myblog

Running this command created a new directory called myblog/ with a few files and folders in it. Notably, there is a manage.py file which is a file used to manage a number of aspects of your Django application such as creating the database and running the development web server. Two other key files we just created are myblog/settings.py which contains configuration information for the application such as how to connect to the database and myblog/urls.py which maps URLs called by a web broser to the appropriate Python code.

Directory variables

Add the following to the top of your myblog/settings.py file:

import os
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__))

Setting up the database

One building block of virtually all websites that contain user-generated content is a database. Databases facilitate a good separation between code (Python and Django in this case), markup and scripts (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and actual content (database). Django and other frameworks help guide developers to separate these concerns.

First we need to update the DATABASES variable in our settings file (myblog/settings.py).

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'myblog.sqlite3'),
    }
}

Now let’s create the database and a super user account for accessing the admin interface which we’ll get to shortly:

$ python manage.py syncdb

After running this command, there will be a database file myblog.sqlite3 in the same directory as manage.py. Right now, this database only has a few tables specific to Django. The command looks at INSTALLED_APPS in myblog/settings.py and creates database tables for models defined in those apps’ models.py files.

Later in this workshop, we will create models specific to the blog we are writing. These models will hold data like blog posts and comments on blog posts.

Hint

SQLite is a self-contained database engine. It is inappropriate for a multi-user website but it works great for development. In production, you would probably use PostgreSQL or MySQL. For more info on SQLite, see the SQLite documentation.

Enabling the admin site

One of the killer features Django provides is an admin interface. An admin interface is a way for an administrator of a website to interact with the database through a web interface which regular website visitors are not allowed to use. On a blog, this would be where the author writes new blog posts.

We need to add 'django.contrib.admin' to INSTALLED_APPS in our settings file (myblog/settings.py). Afterward it should look something like this:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'django.contrib.admin',        # we just added this
)

After adding the admin to our installed apps we need to have Django create the database tables for admin:

$ python manage.py syncdb

We also need to enable admin URLs and enable auto-discovery of admin.py files in our apps. We will create one of these admin.py files later to expose our blog post model and comment model to the admin interface. To enable auto-discovery, we need to uncomment some lines in our project’s urls file (myblog/urls.py). Afterward our urls file should look something like this:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url

from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

Checking our progress

Let’s check our progress by running the Django test server and visiting the admin site.

In your terminal, run the Django development server:

$ python manage.py runserver

Now visit the admin site in your browser (http://localhost:8000/admin/).

Hint

The Django development server is a quick and simple web server used for rapid development and not for long-term production use. The development server reloads any time the code changes but some actions like adding files do not trigger a reload and the server will need to be manually restarted.

Read more about the development server in the official documentation.

Quit the server by holding the control key and pressing C.