Static Django website blueprint

A stripped-down blueprint Django project to serving static templates directly. It is intented as a basis for the Ubuntu design team's informational sites.

Much of Django's dynamic functionality (e.g. sessions, any database interation) has been removed. URLs map directly to template locations, so creating a new web page is as simple as creating a new template file.

Basic usage

Just clone the project and run the server:

git clone https://github.com/ubuntudesign/static-django-blueprint.git
static-django-blueprint
./run     # Download containers, run the dev server and watch for CSS changes

Now visit http://0.0.0.0:8090.

Options

You can customise the way the server is run directly in a few ways:

./run --port 8111          # Run on a custom port
./run --db                 # Run with a database attached
./run --db server --watch  # Run with a database attached, watching for CSS changes (same as above)
./run server               # Run the server without watching for CSS changes

Customising your project

This project is intended to be forked as the basis for a new project, which can then be customised as follows:

Devrun environment settings

You should change the defaults for how ./run behaves in the .env file, e.g.:

PORT=8111                 # Run the server on local port 8111
DJANGO_DEBUG=false        # Turn off Django's DEBUG mode
DEFAULT_COMMAND="server"  # Override default command (what happens on `./run`)
DB=true                   # Attach a database to the webapp

Readme

You should probably customise the README for your new project:

cp README.template.md README.md  # Overwrite this README with the template
vim README.md                    # Customise the README

Templates and stylesheets

Edit template and stylesheets:

vim template/index.html      # Edit the homepage
vim template/about.html      # Create a new page
vim static/sass/global.scss  # Edit the styles

Your changes should show immediately. E.g. the above about.html page should be immediately available at http://0.0.0.0:8090/about.

Error pages

You will probably want to make your error pages look prettier:

vim templates/error/404.html  # Customise the 404 page
vim templates/error/500.html  # Customise the 500 page

Production settings

The default provided webapp/settings.py is written to facilitate overriding of the DEBUG and SECRET_KEY settings.

Debug

The DEBUG setting will default to false (ready for production) unless it's overridden by the DJANGO_DEBUG environment variable (./run takes care of turning DEBUG on in development mode).

Secret key

The SECRET_KEY setting default to "no_secret" unless overridden with the SECRET_KEY environment variable.

It doesn't matter that this is insecure initially, as none of the functionality of the basic project uses the SECRET_KEY. However, you should change it when you get the chance in case someone adds functionality that uses it in the future.

Visit the secret key generator to generate a new key, and then use that secret key in production by setting the SECRET_KEY environment variable.

Dependencies

Among the dependencies of this project are several modules which we, the Ubuntu design team, have written ourselves:

• django-template-finder-view
• django-versioned-static-url
• django-static-root-finder
• django-asset-server-url

License

The content of this project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, and the underlying code used to format and display that content is licensed under the LGPLv3 by Canonical Ltd.

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With ♥ from Canonical.