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GAIN SOME BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT THE CODE DOES IN A DJANGO BOILERPLATE

Here you got a guidance for beginners in Python & Django to understand what the boilerplate for an app with these technologies consists of.

I commented the files with texts from the documentation so that you can understand better what every line of code stands for in an app ready to work with.

I mention below the steps to follow in order to create a similar boilerplate, if you want to create a project by yourself instead of just cloning my repo.

BASICS STEP TO CREATE AN APP WITH DJANGO AND PYTHON

You might need to set up some basic installation in your project. It needs though some basic knowledge of how a text editor works, and to have Python, Django and pip instelled. Let´s set to work!

Create a root folder from scratch in your computer and open it with VSCode

Before running Django, you need to set up a virtual environment (venv) in the root folder and activate it with:

python -m venv ./venv

Then you can start the project running this command on the root folder

django-admin startproject mysite

In manage.py you may find the following standard variable and value:

if name == 'main': main()

It is there so that this root folder where manage.py is, will be considered as a script that can be reused and that will be the main folder of the project as well.

Now that your environment (a "project") has been set up, you're ready to develop an app. What we want to do is to create an application that does something inside our project

Every application you write in Django consists of a Python package that follows a certain convention. Django has a utility that automatically generates the basic directory structure of an application, so you can focus on writing code instead of creating directories.

In orfer to create an app inside our project. We run the following command:

python manage.py startapp my_app_name

What we get is a bunch of files that will be used as a python-package with submodules (the python files belonging to the app).

The init.py file inside the app is nothing but an initializer of the app that tells the main folder of the project that all files inside this folder are to be considered as a python-package (with the python files-submodules we talked about). It can stay empty and the app will run as well!

Setting up environmental variables

Django runs with SQLite by default, that is, a sqlite database file will be automatically added to the root folder because that is what is stated in the settings.py file in the project folder.

In this file you will find a SECRET_KEY variable to run the db, with a value that is not to be exposed, for instance in Github.

In order to keep the secret key ‘secret’ we need to install a Python package that allows the key to be imported to settings.py without compromising the project, so that settings.py can be pushed to your Git repository. Python-dotenv allows us to do this, so run this command

pip install python-dotenv

…and then import to the settings.py the dotenv package as follows:

from dotenv import load_dotenv

Create a file named .env in the root folder, and add there the variable

SECRET_KEY = ”your_database_secret_key”.

Now in settings.py you can just write SECRET_KEY=load_dotenv() and you are ready to go!

But one last thing: add your .env file to your .gitignore file before pushing any code to Git

✔️ Feature 1;
✔️ Feature 2;
✔️ Feature 3;

The following tools were used in this project:

• Django
• Python

Before starting 🏁, you need to have Git installed.

# Clone this project
$ git clone https://github.com/Gustaf26/playground

# Access
$ cd playground

# Install dependencies
$ yarn

# Run the project
$ yarn start

# The server will initialize in the <http://localhost:3000>

This project is under license from MIT. For more details, see the LICENSE file.

Made with ❤️ by Gustaf26

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