-- This README is being constructed as I progress through the project. Information may not yet be accurate. --

Starting A Django Project

If you haven't done so, make sure you already have python installed. To install the latest version of python, go to the official site python.org and download the latest version for your operating system. I will be using Linux and the bash terminal.

Find a location on your hard drive where you want your project to be located at. Name it the name of your project. Open the folder in your IDE (VSCode for me), and launch the terminal. You can also use the operating system's main terminal application, and navigate to the project folder using:

cd path/to/project/folder

Before starting any python project, it is best to create a virtual environment. Virtual environments create a project level separation of modules and libraries so that every project gets a version of the modules they need without effecting anything globally.

To start, we need to create the setup files for the virtual environment in your project folder. We do this with the command:

python -m venv env

Then we need to activate the virtual environment. Run the command bellow:

# start the virtual environment
source env/bin/activate

# if you need to deactivate from a virtual environment, use command:
deactivate

We have our virtual environment up and running. Let's get django added to our environment using pip, python's package manager:

# Assuming you already have python installed, use pip to install packages
pip install django

# Or if you need a specific version
pip install django==3.6

You can check that it was downloaded successfully by using following command:

# You may have to use python3 if you have older versions of python on your system.
# Check by using > python --version
python -m django --version

After you get Django installed, it is time to create a project and give it a name. I chose to call it config because it holds all the settings files and is the main point of configuring your project. To do this, you will run this command:

# The project folder name "config" can be whatever you want to name your project settings folder.
# The optional period at the end will stop the setup from creating two folders of the same name.
django-admin startproject config .

You should now see that you have a project folder with the name you chose and a manage.py file. The manage.py file is a command utility file to interact with your project. In the project folder you will have a files related to configuring your project for development and for serving your project on the web. One of the files, __init__ is there solely to mark to python that this folder should be considered a package. The main two that we need to interact with at the moment is the settings.py and the urls.py.

To run your server and see the development only page, type this command in your terminal at the root of the project where your manage.py lives:

# You can specify ports and/or IPs like so: 0.0.0.0:3000 or just 3000 for the port.
# Default IP: http://127.0.0.1:8000/
python manage.py runserver

Creating Apps For The Project

In order to get functionality from a Django project, we need to create apps (modules) for our project to connect with and utilize. In Django, apps are sections or parts of our project, dealing with specific functionality or features. For example, in an e-commerce application you can have one app for the store front, one for customer accounts, one for the cart and one for checkout.