Tutorial: Setting up the database

So far we’ve started our project in our tutorial but, it really doesn’t do that much. The heart of most web applications is the database. This is where we will store all of the data for our application, in this case our blog posts for our blog.

In the main directory of our project (blog/) we have a file called settings.py. This is where all of the database settings are included. Django currently has built in support for postgre, mysql, sqlite3, oracle, mssql out of the box and you can use any database you’d like for this demo. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to be using sqlite since it’s very easy to use and requires very little configuration. When you open settings.py your find a section with DATABASE_ options. This is where we’ll start making changes

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'
DATABASE_NAME = './blog.db'
DATABASE_USER = ''
DATABASE_PASSWORD = ''
DATABASE_HOST = ''
DATABASE_PORT = ''

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Tutorial: Starting a Project

So now that you’ve completed the first part of the tutorial lets actually get started working with Django.

Let’s create folder called “django-projects” and from the command line in that folder

django-admin.py startproject blog

This command uses the built in django-admin command which creates a basic file structure for our project in a directory called “blog”. Let’s take a quick glance at the files that it made for us

• __init__.py - This file is a “magic” python file that we can ignore
• manage.py - This main file for working with your project from the command line. You won’t need to edit this file ever but, you’ll be using it a bit in a few minutes to run a development server, and sync up your database.
• settings.py - Your basic config file. Contains your DB connection data, directory to your templates, what apps and extra Django modules you want the framework to load
• urls.py - This is where we’ll define the URL’s (URI’s) for our application in a minute

This is the backbone for our project. Django define’s a project as a wrapper around many applications. So a single project can have lots of little applications inside of it. Right now we only have a project. Let’s create out application, again from the command line inside of the “blog” project directory

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Tutorial: Prerequisites and Installation

This tutorial is going to be strictly about Django. There are a few prerequisites you should be familiar with before going on.

• Python
  Django is a web framework written in Python and you really need to know Python to use Django to it’s fullest potential. I highly recommend reading Dive Into Python, a free web based book, as a good primer to the language. I have an outline for an article on learning just enough Python to start with Django but, it’s not completed yet.

• MVC
  Model / View / Controller concept of web frameworks. Arguably Django calls itself a MTV (Model / Template / View) Framework, the core concepts of separation of logic from presentation are very important for properly using Django. Knowing everything about MVC’s isn’t fully required but, if your completely unfamiliar with the concepts this tutorial does not teach them so you may get confused at the layout and structure of the program. This is especially true if your coming from a PHP background and were not using a framework before.

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