Samuli Natri - Django - The Easy Way: A Step-by-Step Guide on Building Django Websites

Install Python 3: https://www.python.org/downloads/.

Im going to call this project QuarkBlob. Lets organize the files like this:

project folder contains the Django web application. These are the files we will deploy to the production environment in the Deployment chapter.

venv is the virtual environment folder.

VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS | Django is like any other Python package and will be installed inside the venv folder. Also the Python executable will be installed in the same folder. This way you can isolate Python and package versions from the system and other projects. We dont copy this folder to the production environment. Instead we install the dependencies (Django and other packets) using pip and requirements.txt file. Read more about venv: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/venv.html.

assets is an optional folder where you can store for example mockups or other related documents.

Inside the Django project folder we have app folders and other relevant files.

APPS are Python packages that live inside the project folder and provides features. You can reuse apps in multiple projects. Apps contain views, models and templates among many things. You usually add new apps to the INSTALLED_APPS list in the settings.py file.

• base app is where we store common reusable items like the base layout.
• blog app provides the blogging functionality for the site.
• We also create apps for feedback and search functionality.
• Inside the project folder we have anotherproject folder (quarkblob/project/project/). This is also considered an app. In here we put files like settings.py that contains site wide configuration data.

Create the project folder somewhere in your system:

Create a virtual environment and activate it:

You might have multiple Python versions installed in your system. Thats why we specify the version with python3.

In Windowsactivate the virtual environment by running venv\Scripts\activate.bat.

Install Django package and create a new Django project:

PIP is a Python package manager. Read more: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/. You can upgrade it with pip install upgrade pip.

DJANGO-ADMIN is a command line tool for administrative tasks. After we have installed the Django project with it we will use manage.py from the project folder. It does mostly the same thing as django-admin but its easier to use when working with a specific project.

Run the development server. We can now use python instead of python3 when the virtual environment is activated:

RUNSERVER starts a development web server. Dont use this with live sites. In the Deployment chapter we will use Nginx and Gunicorn to serve the pages from the production server.

You can ignore the notice about unapplied migrations for now.

Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and you should see the welcome screen: