Clone the repository¶

You can clone the boilerplate repository to your machine, and use it from your machine, that will guarantee you that you always have access to the boilerplate even if you don’t have internet connection.

• Clone the repository

  $ git clone https://github.com/clione/dboilerplate3.git
  

• After cloning the repository to your machine you can start you project (we assume you already installed django either globally or in your virtual environment)

  $ django-admin startproject --template=/path/to/the/template <your_project_name>
  

Grab it from GitHub¶

Downloading the boilerplate from GitHub guarantees you that you always have the latest version, and you can do the installation automatically when you create the project.

$ django-admin startproject --template=https://github.com/clione/dboilerplate3/archive/master.zip myproject

__init__¶

The init file contains the main login to select the environment settings files.

It contains two variables, called DEBUG and STAGING, and the settings work like this:

The variables can be set up in the __init__.py file itself, or you can set the environment variables DJANGO_IS_DEBUG and DJANGO_IS_STAGING if you’re using a user-based deployment.

To add the environment variables to you environment and assuming you’re using bash, just open your .bashrc file and add:

export DJANGO_IS_DEBUG="True"
export DJANGO_IS_STAGING="True"

Replace the “True” values with the values that you want.

defaults.py¶

The defaults.py file contains the core of any project, it sets up the main settings for the application, applications to be loaded, middlewares, etc.

There is nothing special to say in this file, but you will find here the settings for allauth as well as the logging and other minor global settings.

development, production and staging¶

These files contain the enviroment specific settings for each one. That includes the database connections, language settings, django toolbar, email, caching, fixtures, secret_key, allowed hosts, etc.

All of them are prepopulated with dummy data so you know what to modify. You can add as well any other settings that you need for your environment or rewrite the ones loaded already in defaults.

development¶

By default we packa a development.example settings file. This is done on purpose, so the project will fail to run until you set up the development settings and rename the file to development.py.

Populating the requirements¶

To populate the requirements basically open the file related to the environment that need the package and add it there. Usually the commons.txt is used for dependencies that are required across all environments like django itself, or core libraries that the project might use.

Installing requirements¶

The installation of the requirements is done the same way as with a standard requirements file, but this time, calling the environment file.

An example of how to install the development requirements would be:

$ pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

How to use it¶

To create application using the generator you just have to run the management command from /src

$ ./manage.py addapp

It will ask you the values and create all for you.

Configuring the logger¶

By default the loger keeps three 2MB files in your installation, you can change that in teh default.py settings file at the end of it. The parameters are:

• maxBytes
• backupCount

The first value is the amount of MB that a file can reach, in bytes. The second is the number of files to keep, by default is three, and it should be enough, but maybe you need more for your project.

How to log to the logfile¶

Instead of doing prints here and there you can now log to the file doing the following:

Add this to the file where you want to log:

import logging

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

Then to log something you can use the standard python log levels (DEBUG, INFO, ERROR, etc.)

logger.error("This is a error message")
logger.debug("This is a debug message")
logger.info("Seems that something happened")