Setting Up Your First Django Project

1. The Development Environment

Before we install Django itself, it's crucial to create an isolated space for our project's dependencies. As you likely know from your Python experience, a virtual environment ensures that the packages for this project don't conflict with packages for other projects on your system. We will use venv, which is part of Python's standard library.

First, create a new directory for your project and navigate into it. Then, run the following command to create a virtual environment. A common convention is to name the environment directory venv:

# For macOS/Linux
python3 -m venv venv

# For Windows
python -m venv venv

Once created, you need to "activate" it. This adjusts your shell's path to use the Python interpreter and package tools inside the venv directory.

# For macOS/Linux
source venv/bin/activate

# For Windows
.\venv\Scripts\activate

You'll know the environment is active because your command prompt will be prefixed with (venv). From now on, any package you install with pip will be placed in this environment.

2. Installing Django

With your virtual environment active, you can now install Django. It's a package available on the Python Package Index (PyPI), so we'll use pip.

To get a clear demonstration of setting up the virtual environment and installing Django, the following video is a great resource.

As shown in the video, the installation is a single command:

pip install django

After the installation completes, you can verify that Django is installed correctly by checking its version:

django-admin --version

This command should output the installed version number.

3. Creating Your First Project

Now that Django is installed, you can use its command-line utility, django-admin, to generate the boilerplate code for a new project. A Django project is a collection of settings for an instance of Django, including database configuration, Django-specific options, and application-specific settings.

The command to use is startproject. It takes the name of your project's configuration package as an argument. A common best practice is to create the project in the current directory to avoid an extra layer of folder nesting.

django-admin startproject mysite .

Let's break this command down:

• django-admin startproject: The command to create a new project.
• mysite: This will be the name of the Python package containing your project's settings (e.g., settings.py, urls.py). You can name this whatever you like; config is another popular choice.
• . (the dot): This is crucial. It tells Django to create the project in the current directory, which avoids the redundant project-name/project-name/ structure.

The following resources provide both a video walkthrough and the official documentation for this process.

After running the command, your directory should look something like this:

You now have a manage.py file and a mysite directory. We will explore the purpose of each of these files in the next lesson.

django-admin startproject config .

4. Running the Development Server

The final step is to verify that the project works. Django comes with a lightweight web server intended for development purposes. You can start it using the manage.py script.

The manage.py script is a command-line utility that is automatically created in each Django project. It's a thin wrapper around django-admin that also sets the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to point to your project’s settings.py file. From now on, we will use python manage.py for project-specific commands instead of django-admin.

Run the following command in your terminal:

python manage.py runserver

You should see output similar to this, indicating the server has started:

Performing system checks...
System check identified no issues (0 silenced).

You have unapplied migrations; your app may not work properly until they are applied.
Run 'python manage.py migrate' to apply them.

February 07, 2024 - 15:50:53
Django version 4.2, using settings 'mysite.settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

(Don't worry about the "unapplied migrations" warning for now; we'll cover that in a future module.)

Now, open a web browser and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000/. You should see a "Congratulations!" page with a rocket. This confirms your Django project was created successfully!

This section from the Django documentation explains the process clearly.

Conclusion

Congratulations on setting up your first Django project! This is a fundamental skill that you will use every time you start a new Django application.

Here are the key takeaways from this lesson:

• Always use a virtual environment (venv) to isolate project dependencies.
• Install Django from PyPI using pip install django.
• Create a new project skeleton using django-admin startproject <name> ..
• Use the manage.py script for project-specific commands, like runserver.
• The built-in development server is your tool for rapid development and testing.

In the next lesson, we will dive into the files and directories that startproject created. You will learn the purpose of settings.py, urls.py, and manage.py, giving you a clear understanding of your project's architecture.