Django Tutorial

About

Django is an open-source python framework for Web Development.

This is my version of the poll app available in Django Documentation.

Getting started

You need the Django framework, and a virtual environment to work on.

Install virtualenv

If you don't have pip installed yet install it from here

To install the virtualenv package paste the following command

pip3 install virtualenv

In order to create the virtualenv in your project:

virtualenv venv

This will create a virtual environment in a folder called venv.

To activate the venv use the following command:

source venv/bin/activate

If you use different shells like fish (In my case):

source venv/bin/activate.fish

Now install Django, you should install the Django version I used in requirements.txt.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

To start a project do:

django-admin startproject "NAME OF PROJECT"

To start an app use:

django-admin startapp poll

To check if everything is correctly installed, run in the shell the following command:

python3 manage.py runserver 

By default Django uses the port 8000, but you can specify the port you want after runserver, let's run django in the port 1313

python3 manage.py runserver 1313 

Now, type in the bar of your browser localhost:1313, or http://127.0.0.1:1313 (localhost: and 127.0.0.1 are equivalent).

You should have something like this:

Structure

This is a quick explanation of the folder structure that implements the Django web framework.

Tree of the project

├── manage.py
├── Mysite
│   ├── asgi.py
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   └── wsgi.py
└── poll
    ├── admin.py
    ├── apps.py
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── migrations
    │   ├── __init__.py
    ├── models.py
    ├── tests.py
    └── views.py

Files in the project folder:

* Manage.py:
    * Module that allows us to work with Django through the terminal
    * Used to start a server:
    ~~~
    python3 manage.py runserver "PORT"
    ~~~
    * To make migrations
    
* "__init__.py":
    * indicates python that the current folder should be 
      treated as a package
* settings.py:
    *  All the settings for our Website    
* urls.py:
    * Manage the urls in our website. It's a key file
* wsgi.py:
    * used to deploy to a server
* asgi.py
    * used to deploy to a server with ASGI, the emerging Python standard for asynchronous web servers and applications.

• The site could have any amount of apps:

  • You can add and remove to your website bit also reuse those apps in others websites

• To create an app type in the terminal:

    python3 manage.py startapp "APPNAME"

Files in app directory:

* admin.py:
    * Allows us to add stuff to the administration page
* apps.py:
    * Used to configure our app 
* models.py:
    * Used to manage the data in our app
* test.py:
    * Used to make test
* views.py:
    * Display any content from a database to the webpage

I strongly encourage you to review NOTES_files folder, since it has quick explanations, about the basics of Django.