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This document will present the "why" and "how" of using Django framework.

Django Framework

Introduction

Django is an open-source framweork used for creating backend application based on Python. It's goal was to simplify development process, aiming for simplicity, flexibility and scalability.

Django presents following featuers:

  • Relatively simple syntax
  • It has its own web server during development
  • Uses Model-View-Controller core architecture
  • Has HTTP libraries
  • Middleware support
  • Easy to use Python unit test framework

Security is also a top priority for Django. It has built-in securtiy system that helps developers to avoid common security issues such as clickjacking, cross-site scripting, SQL injection.

It is also time-tested by a big and supportive community accross multiple forums, channels. It is well documented for an open-source framework and is maintained on a high level, being regularly updated.

Django is used in projects that need to handle large volumes of data, user interactions or heavy traffic, yet it's simple enough to scale up a smaller project. Some of the big companies in industry that use Django are Instagram, Spotify, Washington Post, Dropbox and many more.

Implementation

Django REST framework helps us build RESTful Web Services flexibly. To install the package, run the command in terminal:

pip install djangorestframework

To create a new Django project:

django-admin startproject InstagramAutomationProject

We created a new database using Azure Coud Web Services and linked our Django project to it in the settings.py file:

Settings.py file contains more project settings such as configuration for CORS, middleware class to listen in on responses, used applications, timezone, language, authenticaion configuration and more.

To set up a new application inside our Django project, run following command:

python manage.py IgBotPrj

To simplify, we created IgBotPrj as our Django project. The IgBotApp is our automation app for Instagram and account is used for JWT authentication on the fronted.

IgBotEnv is our virtual environment for Python. It's not a must to use a VE, but it's considered best practice. Virtual environments are used for dependency management and isolation, ease of installing and using Python packages without system-administrator access, and automated testing of Python software across multiple Python versions. So it keeps our package dependencies clean across multiple projects. To create a VE run the commands:

1. python -m venv <env name>
2. source <EnvName>/bin/activate

Authentication

To create a new app inside our project:path

python manage.py startapp account

This created a new account folder in our IG project folder. To link our app to the project:

{% code title="settings.py" %}

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'account.apps.AccountsConfig'
]

{% endcode %}

Time to create a custom user model. To do this, use the Django's AbstractBaseUser class. This allows having full control of the model by overriding the model shipped by Django. So inside the account/models.py create our model:

It's a simple model containing the basic props: email, username, full_name, DoB, etc, but with enforced email and username.

A very important method is the tokens property. It uses RefreshToken from Simple JWT to create a set of tokens to recognise a user.

Set JWT as the default REST Framework's Default authentication class in our settings.py:

Make Django aware of our custom User model by appending the following to our settings.py file:e

AUTH_USER_MODEL = "account.User"

Now, its safe to run migrations and create the database:

{% code lineNumbers="true" %}

python manage.py makemigrations
    Migrations for 'accounts':
        accounts/migrations/0001_initial.py
            - Create model User
python manage.py migrate //this will create the DB

{% endcode %}

Serialisers - in Django REST Framework are responsible for converting objects into data types understandable by javascript and front-end frameworks.

Views - are Python functions or classes that receive a web request and return a web response. The response can be a simple HTTP response, an HTML template response, or an HTTP redirect response that redirects a user to another page.

To make endpoints, create a urls.py in the account app and add the paths to the corresponding views.

path('token/refresh/',TokenRefreshView.as_view(),name='token_refresh' is important to help recreate access tokens for existing users who want to login.

So for each path there is a corresponding view that we created before that will perform the functionality. For example if accesses the 'login/' endpoint, we will be calling the code from the LoginAPIView that we created in the views folder. 

python manage.py runserver

This will run the Django project on a local server with default port 8000. So in the fronted, if we want to access the endpoints, we will make HTTP requests to our local host: http:localhost:8000/<endpoint>