Learning Django

Here are some of the things I learned and how I devised my ‘workflow’ when writing a Django project. This is really a braindump for myself in the future.

• Set up the environment using virtualenv -p python3.6 outside the working directory. This could just be in my case but I ran into conflict error with a dependency when deleting migrations files and this was my work around.
• Set the SECRET_KEY as an environmental variable in the virtual environment using:

import os 
SECRET_KEY = os.environ['SECRET_KEY']

instead of leaving it inside the settings file. This is a secure way of handling the secret key just remember to load it into the environment variables of the platform you’re launching on (e.g. inside ~/.bashrc) or in Heroku using

heroku config:set SECRET_KEY="<this-is-the-secret>"

• Make a local_settings.py script for development.
• Use django-livereload-server. Because I was also working on the static files using CSS, I did this at some point so I didn’t have to manually refresh the web browser to load any changes.
• Use dj-static to serve static files in Heroku’s Gunicorn. With PythonAnywhere, I did not have to do this. It’s just that Heroku handles static files differently.
• Because some tasks are repetitive, I wrote small bash scripts to help me set-up each directory, delete the migrations files, etc.
• In the views and templates, use request.POST and request.FILES + enctype="multipart/form-data to receive user inputs including images and files
• Lastly, use django_extensions to generate graphviz UML diagrams of each app or the entire project. Aside from an image output, it also generated DOT files in STDOUT which I parsed using a Python script. This made generating documentations a lot easier.

Impressions

Django is sublined as a “web-framework for perfectionists with deadlines”. I’m not sure about being a perfectionist but I was most definitely with deadlines. I’m still trying to learn web development on an inconsistent basis and chose Django because it’s built using the language I’m comfortable with - Python.

I read different tutorials on-line for beginners, including the Django Girls tutorial which helped me tremendously starting out. What I really appreciated about this resource is that it included how to deploy the app in popular platforms such as Heroku and PythonAnywhere, and explained how to connect the application to a PostGres database. I would be using a PostGres database because of the requirements of my project, although SQLite is lightweight and simple enough to manage for anyone starting out.

Overall, compared to my experience with flask and bottle which are both micro-webframeworks (also in Python), I found working with Django to be easier because it has a lot more built-in functions and more extensive documentation (I mean, really!). It was a pleasant surprise to finish the prototype web application I was making in so short a time (hurray deadlines). I also enjoyed coding the models and learned a lot about data fields, tables, and relations, specially that I can see them implemented immediately when the code runs. It was a bit nuanced to troubleshoot though since this sometimes involved managing the database as well (SQLite is more straight-forward to manage than PostGres because it’s essentially just a file. For PostGres, I used PgAdmin). But most of the time, with Django, you can perform the database connections in pure Python without a single line of SQL. Lastly, what I also liked about Django is the immense community behind the framework. It’s really easy to find a Stack Overflow discussion about common setbacks I encountered - which in turn helped me better understand what’s going on under the hood.

See sample project mysite based on the Django Girls Tutorial.