jimray/django-project-skeleton

#django-skeleton This is a project template for Django 1.6+ projects. It's based on a lot of ideas from Two Scoops of Django, 12 factor methodology, and plays particularly well with Heroku (though doesn't require deploying to Heroku).

I highly recommend reading Two Scoops of Django for a number of reasons, starting with a understanding everything happening here.

This skeleton installs a few handy apps alongside Django, including:

South for database migrations
dj-database-url for easier database configuration
dj-static for serving static assets in production
braces for working with class-based views
model utils add a couple of handy model utilities
psycopg2 for connecting to Postgres

Setting up your environment

The easiest thing to do is use Vagrant to build a box configured to run Django apps. Here's a Vagrantfile and provision.sh that will build a box with Python 2.7.6 and 3.3.3, virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper, Postgres, and the Heroku toolbelt. Download those into an empty folder.

$vagrant up
$vagrant ssh

Once you ssh into the vagrant virtual machine, a virtualenv will already be configured for you called django, a Postgres database will already be created called django.

Or, you can set up virtualenv[wrapper] on your local machine.

Setting up a project

There's a bit of a catch-22 here where you need to install Django before you can set everything else up. A bit later we'll use a requirements.txt file to install dependencies.

pip install Django==1.6.2

Now, start a new project

django-admin.py startproject --template=https://codeload.github.com/jimray/django-project-skeleton/zip/master --name=Procfile,Procfile.local,.env [my_project]

For local development, install the dependencies defined in the local requirements file.

pip install -r requirements/local.txt

For production, use requirements/production. Since Heroku looks at requirements.txt in the root, it points here.

Possible next steps

Some things you might do next:

Create an app

django-admin.py startapp [my_app]

django-admin.py startapp --template=https://github.com/jimray/django-app-skeleton/archive/master.zip [myapp]

Build some models

# my_app/models.py
from django.db import models
from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from model_utils.models import TimeStampedModel

class MyModel(TimeStampedModel):
    # 'created' and 'modified' come for free with TimeStampedModel
    name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    slug = models.SlugField()

    class Meta:
        verbose_name_plural = 'MyModels'

    def __unicode__(self):
        return '%s' % (self.name)

    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return '/%s/' % (self.slug)

    def save(self):
        self.slug = slugify(self.name)
        super(MyModel, self).save()

Route some urls

# my_project/urls
from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url

from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^', include('[my_app].urls')),
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

# my_app/urls
from django.conf.urls import patterns, url
from .views import HomePageView, MyViewDetailView
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(
        regex = r'^$',
        view = HomePageView.as_view(),
        name = 'homepage'
    ),
    url(
        regex = r'^(?P<slug>[-\w]+)/$',
        view = MyViewDetailView.as_view(),
        name = 'detail'
    ),
)

Make some views

# my_app/views
from django.shortcuts import render
from django.views.generic import ListView, DetailView
from .models import MyModel


class HomePageView(ListView):
    model = MyModel
    context_object_name = 'things'
    template_name = 'my_app/homepage.html'


class DetailView(DetailView):
    model = MyModel
    template_name = 'my_app/detail.html'

Sync to the database for the first time

foreman run newproject/manage.py syncdb

Assuming you have the admin enabled, this will also ask you for a superuser.

foreman run newproject/manage.py schemamigration [my_app] --initial

foreman run newproject/manage.py migrate [my_app]

Start the app with Foreman

foreman start -f Procfile.local

TODO

Setting up Heroku (probably a bash script?)
Add Node + gulp/brunch with tasks to compile SASS, etc

Acknowledgements

This skeleton borrows liberally from the Two Scoops project template. Again, I highly recommend Two Scoops of Django for more on Django best practices.

jimray / django-project-skeleton