kblicharski / cookiecutter-simple-django

A cookiecutter template for creating reusable Django projects quickly. This repo contains a personalized version, adapted from the fork I created for The Signal Center.

cookiecutter-simple-django

A cookiecutter template for Django.

Description

A customized and opinionated fork of cookiecutter-simple-django, originally inspired by Daniel Greenfeld's cookiecutter-django. This fork is personalized from the version I created for The Signal Center, intended to be used for bootstrapping personal projects and hackathon projects.

Usage

Let's pretend you want to create a Django project called "redditclone". Rather than using startproject and then editing the results to include your name, email, and various configuration issues that always get forgotten until the worst possible moment, get cookiecutter to do all the work.

Set up your virtualenv with virtualenvwrapper and install cookiecutter:

$ mkvirtualenv redditclone
$ workon redditclone
$ pip install cookiecutter

Use cookiecutter to clone and configure this repository:

$ cd <your-workspace>
$ cookiecutter https://github.com/kblicharski/cookiecutter-simple-django.git

It will prompt you for questions. Answer them:

project_name [project_name]:
repo_name [repo_name]:
author_name [Your name]:
email [Your email]:
description [A short description of the project]:
year [Current year]:
use_sqlite_as_local_db_engine [no]:

If you used the default of "no" for use_sqlite_as_local_db_engine, create a database for the project before continuing.

Continue setting up your project:

$ cd redditclone/
$ pip install -r requirements/local.txt
$ python ./manage.py syncdb
$ python ./manage.py migrate
$ python ./manage.py runserver

Create a GitHub repo and push your project:

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "(build): Initial project config"
$ git remote add origin [e-mail]:kblicharski/example-project-repo.git
$ git push -u origin master

Note: The requirements files don't define any package versions because it makes more sense for you to use the latest ones when you set up your project. After that point though, you really want to take note of the specific versions installed so that they are not going to get updated without you knowing it.

In order to do this, activate your virtual environment, and update your requirements files using pipdeptree:

$ workon redditclone
$ pipdeptree -f --warn silence | grep '^[a-zA-Z]' > requirements.txt

Structure

The structure used should look quite familiar:

Requirements

The requirements folder contains a requirements file for each environment.

If you need to add a dependency please choose the right file.

Settings

The settings folder contains a settings file for each environment.

The testing.py module is loaded automatically after base.py and local.py every time you run python ./manage.py test.

Apps

The apps folder should contain all your local Django apps in order to keep the structure of the project clean.

When it's time to python ./manage.py startapp <name>, move the generated module to apps. If you want to know why this works, just take a look at the line:

sys.path.insert(0, root('apps'))

in settings/base.py.