Hi dev community!

This time I'll be showing you the basic process to develop a web app using Django. We'll be exploring most of its base functionality, seeing how its administrator view works, creating a database with foreign relations, and exposing it to your local network.

I'll try to make the process as easy to understand as I possible, so anyone interested in it, could create one.

Let's get start with the base of everything

What is Django?

Django is a python framework that allows you to develop web applications with the minimum effort. It provides a basic folder structure where you'll be placing logic functionality, HTML layouts, styles, and much more.

First things go first

Anaconda environments

Prepare an environment to install Django, an advantage offered by python is the availability to create environments with low memory usage, installing just the essentials, using Anaconda. Please install it by executing its Windows installer (in case you're using Windows) or any other installation method described in this page.

Installing Anaconda step by step is this post's out of reach, sorry :(

Once you have successfully installed Anaconda, then open up the command prompt and type the following command

conda create --name envname python=3.6
Please, change the envname to whatever name you want to set to your environment

What we have done is telling Anaconda to create a basic environment using python 3.6 version.

During installation, you'll be asked to confirm package and dependencies installation, so please type Y to proceed without any troubles

Preparing Django

Great! time to install Django, inside your Anaconda prompt type the following command

conda activate envname
Please, change envname with your already set environment name
This will activate your environment whose going to be used

Now you're inside your environment, so time to install Django by typing the following

pip install Django
Note: Anaconda has a special way to install packages, that is supposed to be better than classic pip installation, however Django doesn't have an anaconda distribution.

Time to get dirty

Let's start validating our Django installation by running the following command inside Anaconda Prompt

python -m django --version
Remember to activate your environment with command described above

If your don't get an error saying No module names django and get something like 3.x.x instead , then django is ready!

Creating a project

Creating a Django project should be as easy as typing on your target directory

IMPORTANT change your default directory to something you remember well, because we'll be accessing to it further this series.

django-adming startproject project_name
Please, change project_name to your website desire name

Then a directory should be created in the following structure

project_name /
     manage.py
     project_name /
          __init__.py
          settings.py
          urls.py
          asgi.py
          wsgi.py

1. The first project_name is the base folder where all project is located
2. manage.py is a python file that will let you interact with Django based in commands
3. The second project_name is a directory containing all necessary tools to work with Django storing database settings, urls, and configurations.
4. init.py an empty file to let know python this is a package.
5. settings.py a file with Django settings
6. urls.py your Django urls directory (when you create a page inside your website, your page url might be here)
7. asgi.py an entry point, allowing compatibility with ASGI servers (not used in this tutorial)
8. wsgi.py an entry point, allowing compatibility with WSGI servers (not used in this tutorial)

Final thoughts

At this point Django can run, just type this command on your project base directory (where manage.py is located). Easy, right?

python manage.py runserver

And your done with a basic Django application. Surely you'll see a really basic webpage with almost nothing, but the adjustments and details will be tackle in the next post ;)