Building a Django App

A Web framework provides infrastructure to create Web applications without repetition of code. It contains apps to perform most of the common tasks that are required by the Web applications. Before getting your hands dirty on Django, you need to know something about Python. It is an open source general-purpose high-level programming language. It can be used for Web development, games creation, data visualisation, software development and much more.

Python installation

Python needs to be installed on the system in order to work with Django, which requires Python 2.3 or newer versions.

On Windows
You can download Python from https://www.python.org/downloads/. Run the downloaded file and it can be installed like any other Windows software (see Figure 1) .
Once Python is installed, you need to add its executable file to your system’s path.

On Linux
Most of the open source UNIX clones such as Linux or the BSD come with Python installed as a part of their core system.

Testing

Open a terminal and type the following command:

python.

Now, it’s time to get started with Django, which is a Web framework written in Python. Using the former, we can build high quality and robust Web applications with minimal effort. Django is also known as ‘…the Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.’

Django installation

Download the Django code from www.djangoproject.com/download/ and once that’s done, open a terminal, navigate to the folder where Django has been downloaded and locate the file named setup.py.
On a Linux system, type the following command:

sudo setup.py install

On Windows, type:

python setup.py install

This setup.py script is a standard installation procedure for Python modules and it takes care of installing the module into the correct locations. After this, you need to set the path for Django-admin, which is in the Django bin folder.

My first Django project

To create a Django project, open the terminal, navigate to the directory in which you want to create the project and type the following command:

django-admin startproject cmsApp

It will create a directory named cmsApp in the destination folder. This cmsApp folder will contain a folder named cmsApp and a manage.py script.
Besides this, the manage.py script and four other scripts are created inside the cmsApp folder.
1. settings.py: This script contains the default configuration for the project, like database information, debugging flags and important variables
2. Urls.py: This file contains the configuration that maps the URL patterns to the task performed by the applications
3. __init__.py: This file makes the project directory a Python package
4. wsgi.py: It exposes the WSGI callable as a module-level variable named application.
Now issue the manage.py runserver command to see something like what’s shown below:

$ manage.py runserver
Performing system checks...

System check identified no issues (0 silenced).
August 04, 2015 - 12:16:15
Django version 1.8.2, using settings ‘cmsApp.settings’
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CTRL-BREAK.

Open the link http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your Web browser and you should see the screen shown in Figure 4:

A CMS application

Creating a simple CMS application is one of the most common tasks in Web development. It allows users to edit and create dynamic Web pages.
1. Issue the command python manage.py startapp CMS to create a CMS application in your project. Open settings.py and add CMS to the INSTALLED_APPS variable.
2. Open models.py which is in your CMS application folder with a text editor and add the following code:

class IntroductionPage(models.Model):
title=models.CharField(max_length=100)
body=models.TextField()
time=models.DateTimeField()

3. Now create tables for our CMS application by issuing the command python manage.py syncdb to get the following output:

$ manage.py syncdb
c:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\core\management\commands\syncdb.py:24: RemovedInDjango19Warning: The syncdb command will be removed in Django 1.9
warnings.warn(“The syncdb command will be removed in Django 1.9”, RemovedInDjango19Warning)

Operations to perform:
Synchronize unmigrated apps: staticfiles, messages
Apply all migrations: sessions, admin, sites, flatpages, contenttypes, auth, CMS
Synchronizing apps without migrations:
Creating tables...
Running deferred SQL...
Installing custom SQL...
Running migrations:
Rendering model states... DONE
Applying CMS.0001_initial... OK

4. Now the application needs to instruct Django which model should be shown for editing. Open models.py of the CMS application and the add following line at the beginning of the script:

import django.contrib import admin

5. Now add following line at the end of models.py:

admin.site.register(IntroductionPage)

The modified models.py will look like what’s shown in Figure 5:

6. Now run the server by issuing the command manage.py runserver and enter your login credentials to see the screen shown in Figure6’.
7. Add contents to the page by clicking on ‘Add’ on the introduction page.
8. Now we need to create a client-side template for our application.
Create an HTML file archive in cmsApp/CMS/templates/archive.html and add the following code to it:

{% for content in contents %}
<h2>{{content.title}}</h2>
<p>{{content.body}}</p>
{% endfor %}}

9. Now to create a view function in our CMS app’s views.py file, use the following code.

from django.template import loader,Context
from django.http import HttpResponse
from cmsApp.CMS.models import IntroductionPage

def archive(request):
contents= IntroductionPage.objects.all()
t=loader.gettemplate(“archive.html”)
c= Context({‘contents’:contents})
return HttpResponse(t.render(c))

10. The next step is to map the task to the URL. Open the urls.py of the project, add the following line of code to catch any requests that begin with introductionpage/ and pass them to urlConf.

url(r’^introductionpage/’, include(‘CMS.urls’)),

Now create a urls.py file in the CMS folder and add the following lines of code:

from django.conf.urls import url
from . import views
urlpatterns = [
url(r’^$’, views.archive, name=’archive’),
]

11. Open http://127.0.0.1:8000/introductionpage/.

References
[1] Python web development with Django, Addison-Wesley
[2] The Django book – www.djangobook.com