making web apps with django and python [1]

I recently started following a youtube tutorial on how to make web apps with django and felt it would help if i journaled my whole journey here , for memory plus it could help someone maybe. I'll journal the whole journey from start to finish.

In this article we will learn how to :

• setup a virtual environment for development.
• start a django project.
• Quick detour of files created .
• run the project in your browser.

setting up a virtual environment for our project

the commands are the same for all operating systems Prerequisites:

Python3 [ nothing else just that].

• Please refer to this for python3 installation.
  
  • Go on and open your terminal , let's type .

    python3 -m venv pykith_env
    

  • The above command creates a virtual environment called pykith_env, you can replace this with a name of your own choosing.
  • Now let's activate the virtual environment.

    source pykith_env/bin/activate
    

  • The virtual env you created is now active.
  • Create a folder for our project under a name of your choosing , I'll use blog_projects.

    mkdir blog_projects
    

  • Now change directory to the folder you just created.

    cd blog_projects
    

    Installing django starting your web application

  • Time to install django, Let's use pip for this.

    pip install django
    

  • Since django is now installed ,
  • Lets see what commands we now have available to us. Type django-dmin in the terminal.
  • If everything is working fine , you should get something like this:

• those are the options we can use with the django-admin command, let's move on and use one of them to fire up our first project, we'll use the startproject option. Find a name for your project, I'll use pykith_project for mine.

  django-admin startproject pykith_project
  

• We'll take a quick detour of the files in the newly created project folder pykith_project. You can use your file manager or IDE for this.
• You'll find the following files created in the folder.

• In the base directory, we have a file manage.py and a directory pykith_project.
• We we'll use the manage.py file in future articles and down below when testing our web app in a browser.
• The settings.py file will definitely be used for managing different settings for our web application.
• wsgi.py handles rendering of files to the browser. wsgi in full is web site gateway interface I think.
• Now change directory to the newly created dir pykith_project and run :

  python manage.py runserver
  

• This will start the application on 127.0.0.1:8000 which is localhost , copy that url as it is in your terminal and paste it in your browser url bar to render the app.

• If all is going well to this point , you should be able to see something like that with links to the documentation and a message denoting a successfull django installation.
• Now we will trying going to a differnt location on the web app , the /admin/ route. This is all handled by the urls.py file from the files you saw previously created. Let's take a quick look at urls.py.

• From the code you see in the file, when we try to got to /admin, the urls.py file sends our request to admin.sites.url and the rest of the logic happens there.
• Now go to the url you typed in your browser and add /admin. This should take you to the default admin login page for Django.

• This panel will be set up and used for managing our web app in future articles.
• We will write some routes and create an application in the next articles.

• To stop the server , type Ctrl + C.

  • In this article , we covered the first steps of creating a basic django application.
  • In the next article, we will create a django application and do some url routing.
    

    dont forget to drop your reactions regards this article. If you learnt something from this material, please leave a comment :)