Django 1.6 Template

Overview

This is a modified and repurposed version of this project https://github.com/twoscoops/django-twoscoops-project. Also, I've trimmed the instructions to work with a *nix system (not Windows).

The goal is to have a standardized baseline Django 1.6 application skeleton to build web applications from.

Requirements

The documentation below assumes you're using virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper to manage versions and dependencies within different development environments. In order to properly develop this application you should have the following installed:

Create a Virtual Environment

In a terminal, create your virtual environment using virtualenvwrapper commands. Here we'll name it django16, but you may want to change it to something that makes more sense for your this environment.

$ mkvirtualenv django16

You should see something similar to the following:

New python executable in django16/bin/python
Installing Setuptools ...done.
Installing Pip ...done.

…and your prompt should now look something like this:

(django16)$

Note: See the Virtualenvwrapper Docs for more commands.

Clone the Template

To create a project using this template, open a terminal and navigate to the place where you want to keep your project, let's say it's ~/projects/.

(django16)$ cd ~/projects

Assuming you are still in the context of the django16 virtual environment, let's clone the project into a directory called projectName:

(django16)$ git clone https://github.com/dereknutile/django-1.6-template.git projectName

Install Dependencies

First, make sure you are in the directory for the project you just made:

(django16)$ cd projectName

You should now be in the ~/projects/projectName directory.

Installing dependencies is done using PIP and is relative to your environment. The environment requirements are listed within requirements directory with a file name like {environment}.txt.

To install requirements on your development system, use PIP to reference the development configuration file:

(django16)$ pip install -r requirements/development.txt

Run Server

First, initialize the SQLITE database. Note: you may be asked to define the superuser/admin.

(django16)$ python project/manage.py syncdb

Run the server ...

(django16)$ python project/manage.py runserver

Test it out: http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Best Practices

Apps

There's a directory to drop your apps into: project/apps/. To keep the directory structure clean, organized, and re-usable, place your existing apps right in that directory or use django-admin.py to generate them in that directory like this:

(django16)$ cd project/apps/
(django16)$ django-admin.py startapp newapp

Once you've got your app in the right place, call it from the right environmental settings file. If this app can be used in any environment, then open project/project/settings/base.txt and find the LOCAL_APPS() tuple. In the example above, the LOCAL_APP tuple would look like this (don't forget to include the apps prefix):

# Apps specific for this project go here.
LOCAL_APPS = (
    'apps.newapp',
)

denysbutenko/django-1.6-template