Welcome to Django Practical Guide!¶
Contents:
Approach¶
We take the following approaches for this training syllabus:-
- Task based instead of topic based.
Prework¶
Before starting the training, there are a number of things you need to do to prepare your work environment.
Editor/IDE¶
We’ll not use any IDE (Integrated Development Environment) but just a simple editor that is VIM.
Install Django¶
This training assume you’re using Ubuntu OS where Python already pre-installed. So the only thing left to do is to get Django somehow available to be used for our exercised going forward.
LESSON 01 - Build a Page¶
This is definitely the first thing everyone learning web development would like to do. How to display something when user type URL like ‘www.mywebsite.com’ in their browser address bar. We’ll learn how to do it in this chapter using Django.
Start Django Project¶
Assuming Django properly installed, we can run the following command:
django-admin startproject myshop .
Above command will create a new directory called myshop in your current directory. It should look like below when you run command tree . in your current directory:
.
├── manage.py
└── myshop
├── __init__.py
├── settings.py
├── urls.py
└── wsgi.py
1 directory, 5 files
This is an initial structure for our Django project. We can try to run it using command:
python manage.py runserver
You should see an output like below:
Performing system checks...
System check identified no issues (0 silenced).
You have unapplied migrations; your app may not work properly until they are applied.
Run 'python manage.py migrate' to apply them.
December 24, 2014 - 01:52:42
Django version 1.7.1, using settings 'myshop.settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.
This mean your new Django project now ready to serve a request from browser or any HTTP client and will return a response.
Todo
Should we put the error when python manage.py migrate not run or just include the command above before running manage.py runserver ?
Try to access the page using browser. Type into the browser’s address bar - http://localhost:8000/. You should see something like below:-
Mapping URL to function¶
So how actually the page being generated ? How Django know to generate the page when user type the URL such as http://localhost:8000/ above ?
Django allow us to define a mapping between the url such as:-
To a certain a function that will be executed to return the output (response) to user. So url like http://localhost:8000/ can be mapped to function named index() and Django will call that function whenever user request the url through their browser or any HTTP client.
Note
Browser like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer are just one of HTTP client that can be used to access HTTP resources using URL. There are also command line clients like CURL or Wget that also can be used similar to browsers.
The process of mapping URL path to function (or any kind of handlers) also called routing. In Django, this is done through urlpatterns configuration. Open file named myshop/urls.py [download] and you should see the following code:
from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url
from django.contrib import admin
urlpatterns = patterns('',
# Examples:
# url(r'^$', 'myshop.views.home', name='home'),
# url(r'^blog/', include('blog.urls')),
url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)