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django-sample-app

django-sample-app is a minimal sample application to start developing your web project immediately on Django framework.

The sample application comes with:

• Modernizr v2.6.2
• jQuery v1.9.1
• jQuery UI v1.9.2
• Twitter Bootstrap v2.3.0
• Font Awesome v3.0

that are glued together with initializr. And its current requirements.txt file is:

Django==1.5.1
South==0.7.6
django-admin-tools==0.5.1
django-debug-toolbar==0.9.4
django-extensions==1.1.1
ipython==0.13.2
psycopg2==2.5
readline==6.2.4.1
six==1.3.0
wsgiref==0.1.2

Installation

1. virtualenv / virtualenvwrapper

You should already know what is virtualenv, preferably virtualenvwrapper at this stage. So, simply create it for your own project, where myproject is the name of your project:

$ mkvirtualenv --clear myproject

2. Download

Now, you need the django-sample-app project files in your workspace:

$ cd /path/to/your/workspace
$ git clone git://github.com/kirpit/django-sample-app.git myproject && cd myproject
$ mv sampleapp myproject

3. Requirements

Right there, you will find the requirements.txt file that has all the great debugging tools, django helpers and some other cool stuff. To install them, simply type:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Remember to install readline with "easy_install" that is necessary for IPython to work properly:

$ easy_install -a readline

4. Static files for django-admin

You need to create a symbolic link to your django admin static folder under your "static_extra" directory. I assume you are still in the same, project's root directory:

$ ln -s /path/to/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/static/admin static_extra/admin

You can find out the location of your "site-packages" folder by the following command if necessary:

$ python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())"

5. Tweaks

wsgihandler.py

wsgihandler.py file is necessary for WSGI gateways (such as uWSGI) to run your Django application and also required from Django itself. You definitely want to change sampleapp.settings value in this file to whatever you name your application (e.g. myproject.settings).

SECRET_KEY

Go to http://www.miniwebtool.com/django-secret-key-generator/, create your secret key, copy it. Open your myproject/settings/default.py, find SECRET_KEY line, paste your secret key.

Other settings stuff

It is good idea to make a find & replace within this default settings file as there are some "sampleapp" string left such as ROOT_URLCONF or LOCAL_APPS variables, but not only.

Main URL root

You also have to config your application URLs, specific to your own needs. For the beginning, the sample app has only one view that you need to modify its namespace from myproject/urls.py, where it imports HomeView.

local.py (development specific) settings file

Copy myproject/settings/local.template.py as local.py into the same directory and modify necessary changes. local.py is always ignored by .gitignore, so this is the machine specific settings usually for development purposes.

Initialize the database

You should have already created your database and set the credentials in your local.py now. Time to finish it up:

./manage.py syncdb and ./manage.py migrate

Ready? Go!

./manage.py runserver

or

./manage.py runserver_plus