This project is no longer maintained. There are much better options out there now.

This is a starting template for Django website projects with HTML5 Boilerplate integrated. To get started, create a virtualenv, install Django, and then use Django's startproject command and specify the template (replace project_name with the name of your project)

virtualenv project_name
source project_name/bin/activate
pip install Django
django-admin.py startproject --extension=py,ex,rst --template=https://github.com/mike360/django-html5-boilerplate/zipball/master project_name

After creating the project you can start up the development server right away.

python manage.py runserver 0:8000

Now you'll need to configure your database. Open up settings/dev.py and configure your local settings (database, etc.) I go into more detail about the way settings are handled in the Settings Module.

In this settings module setup, all settings are stored and versioned under the settings/ folder in the root of the project folder. All of the global and common settings are stored in settings/base.py and anything environment specific should be in a separate file that imports from base. There is a settings/dev.py file included, and it is the default DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE as specified in the wsgi.py file.

A template for subsequent environments (e.g. staging, production) is included in settings/environment.py.ex. In order to make use of those files you'll need to override the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable set in wsgi.py and manage.py in your specific server environment. This is handled in various ways depending on your environment. It is a good practice to keep the other environments' settings files versioned as well.

This method of handling settings is great for the solo developer who needs to manage multiple deployment environments. It's ready out of the box to run well this way. When a project has multiple developers, each developer should maintain their own local settings file and exclude it from source control. This template can handle that with a couple of tweaks.

To bootstrap the project:

virtualenv {{ project_name }}
source {{ project_name }}/bin/activate
cd path/to/{{ project_name }}/repository
pip install -r requirements.txt
manage.py syncdb