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.

While this project is public, you won't be able to use it out of the box unless you have access to the private django-fenchurch plugin - which is currently only accessible by members of Canonical. We have plans to change this soon.

Basic usage

Just clone the project and delete its version history:

git clone https://github.com/ubuntudesign/static-django-website-blueprint.git example-project
cd example-project
rm -rf .git   # Remove the existing git information
make setup    # Install dependencies etc. for development
make develop  # Run the development server

Now visit http://0.0.0.0:8099.

You can customise the port for the dev server by specifying the PORT environment variable:

PORT=8054 make develop

Customisation

The most basic way to customise the project is to create templates and stylesheets:

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

Your changes should show immediately. Your new about.html page should be immediately available at http://0.0.0.0:8007/about.

Readme

You should probably customise the README for your new project:

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

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

Dev port

By default, make develop will start the development server on port 8099. However you may want to customise this by editing the Makefile:

# Makefile

ifeq ($(PORT),)
    PORT=8099  # Default port for the dev server
endif

Secret key

The app comes with the SECRET_KEY setting set to "SECRET_KEY_INSECURE_PLACEHOLDER".

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 set it in webapp/settings.py as follows:

# webapp/settings.py

SECRET_KEY = '!!!YOUR_NEW_SECRET_KEY_HERE!!!'

Dependencies

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

• django-fenchurch (private - soon to be open-sourced)
• django-versioned-static-url
• django-static-root-finder
• django-asset-server-url