Django Unboxed

Intro

• Django is a library of reusable modules to build a fast scaleable website with Python.
• It will help us handle HTTP requests, cookies etc
• Django will determine the structure of our project also
• We will also try to deploy our django site to Cloudflare

Setup

• Run the following in your terminal

$ pip install django==4.2

Generate Project

• Run the following in the terminal

$ django-admin startproject app .

Running the Django Dev Server

• Once running the dev server should be available here by default
• Here we will run a specific command from manage.py called runserver
• This is similar to scripts in node package.json file

$ python manage.py runserver

Add additional Apps to the project

• startapp is another command for adding new apps

$ python manage.py startapp website

Working on new app

• In our new website folder we will create a view and add routing

Creating the new View

• Open the website/views.py file in you IDE
• Add the following

from django.http import HttpResponse          # Here we import the HttpResponse method
from django.shortcuts import render

# Create your views here.

def index(request):                           # All default views have the name index although not required it is the standard naming convention
    return HttpResponse('gikken.com algos')   # We then return a string for the moment

Adding routing to the website app

• Create a new file in website called urls.py
• Add the following

from django.urls import path    # We get the path method 
from . import views             # We import from the local dir to make sure we dont import an external views package

urlpatterns = [                 # All routing url files must have the name urlpatterns
    path('', views.index)       # We then point the route to the view function, note it is uncalled here, also empty string is the top root
]

Add top level routing

• We then update the top level routing in app/urls.py
• Add the following

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include     # We import the include method

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('', include('website.urls'))     # We point the top level route to our new app urls file, this will pick up the urlpatterns object
]

Add new Page

• We will add the full page output
• In this site it will show algos

Updating views.py

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.shortcuts import render

# Create your views here.

def index(request):
    return HttpResponse('gikken.com algos')

def full_page(request):                        # We add this new function
    return HttpResponse('Full Page Layout')    # Just return some simple text for now