README.md

Your first Django project!

Part of this chapter is based on tutorials by Geek Girls Carrots (http://django.carrots.pl/).

Parts of this chapter are based on the django-marcador tutorial licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The django-marcador tutorial is copyrighted by Markus Zapke-Gründemann et al.

We're going to create a simple blog!

The first step towards creating it is to start a new Django project. Basically, this means that we'll run some scripts provided by Django that will create the skeleton of a Django project for us: a bunch of directories and files that we will later use.

The names of some files and directories are very important for Django. You should not rename the files that we are about to create. Moving them to a different place is also not a good idea. Django needs to maintain a certain structure in order to be able to find important things.

Remember to run everything in the virtualenv. If you don't see a prefix (myvenv) in your console you need to activate your virtualenv. We explained how to do that in the Django installation chapter in the Working with virtualenv part. You can do that by typing the following command: myvenv\Scripts\activate on Windows or myvenv/bin/activate on Mac OS / Linux.

In console you should run (remember that you don't type (myvenv) ~/djangogirls$, OK?):

(myvenv) ~/djangogirls$ django-admin startproject mysite .

On Windows:

(myvenv) C:\Users\Name\djangogirls> python myvenv\Scripts\django-admin.py startproject mysite .

Note Double-check that you included the period (.) at the end of the command, it's important because it tells the script to install Django in your current directory.

django-admin.py is a script that will create the directories and files for you. You should now have a directory structure which looks like this:

djangogirls
├───manage.py
└───mysite
        settings.py
        urls.py
        wsgi.py
        __init__.py

manage.py is a script that helps with management of the site. With it we will be able to start a web server on our computer without installing anything else, amongst other things.

The settings.py file contains the configuration of your website.

Remember when we talked about a mail carrier checking where to deliver a letter? urls.py file contains a list of patterns used by urlresolver.

Let's ignore the other files for now - we won't change them. The only thing to remember is not to delete them by accident!

Changing settings

Let's make some changes in mysite/settings.py. Open the file using the code editor you installed earlier.

It would be nice to have the correct time on our website. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones and copy your relevant time zone (TZ). (eg. Europe/Berlin )

You should find lines that contain USE_TZ and TIME_ZONE and modify them to look like this, substituting Europe/Berlin with your relevant time zone:

TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Berlin'

USE_TZ = False

Setup a database

There's a lot of different database software that can store data for your site. We'll use the default one, sqlite3.

This is already set up in this part of your mysite/settings.py file:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
    }
}

To create a database for our blog, let's run the following in the console: python manage.py migrate (we need to be in the djangogirls directory that contains the manage.py file). If that goes well, you should see something like this:

(myvenv) ~/djangogirls$ python manage.py migrate
Operations to perform:
  Apply all migrations: admin, contenttypes, auth, sessions
Running migrations:
  Applying contenttypes.0001_initial... OK
  Applying auth.0001_initial... OK
  Applying admin.0001_initial... OK
  Applying sessions.0001_initial... OK

And we're done! Time to start the web server and see if our website is working!

You need to be in the directory that contains the manage.py file (the djangogirls directory). In the console, we can start the web server by running python manage.py runserver:

(myvenv) ~/djangogirls$ python manage.py runserver

Now all you need to do is check that your website is running - open your browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer or whatever you use) and enter the address:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/

The web server will take over your command prompt until you stop it: to type more commands either open a new terminal window (and don't forget to activate your virtualenv in it too), or stop the web server by switching back to the window in which it's running and pressing CTRL+C - Control and C buttons together (on Windows, you might have to press Ctrl+Break).

Congratulations! You've just created your first website and run it using a web server! Isn't that awesome?

Ready for the next step? It's time to create some content!