django_by_example

• Code for Django by Example book by Antonio Mele
• Archived due to a new book edition: Django 2 by Example

My Progress

• Chapter 1: Building a Blog Application
• Chapter 2: Enhancing Your Blog with Advanced Features
• Chapter 3: Extending Your Blog Application
• Chapter 4: Building a Social Website
• Chapter 5: Sharing Content in Your Website
• Chapter 6: Tracking User Actions
• Chapter 7: Building an Online Shop
• Chapter 8: Managing Payments and Orders
• Chapter 9: Extending Your Shop
• Chapter 10: Building an e-Learning Platform
• Chapter 11: Caching Content
• Chapter 12: Building an API

Environment Variables

All sensitive data (user names, passwords, Django secret key and etc) should be stored via environment variables and will be load by os.environ. Any missing values will raise ImproperlyConfigured exception. List of required environment variables:

Variable	Value
SECRET_KEY	Django secret key
EMAIL_HOST_USER	Google email account name to send mails from django (example@gmail.com)
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD	Google account password or application specific password for two factor authentication

I use two ways to set environment variables: via Pycharm (my primary IDE for development) and via virtualenvwrapper scripts.

Setting Environment Variables with Pycharm

There're few places where you can specify environment variables:

1. Run Configurations
2. Python and Django console
3. manage.py Pycharm settings

Run Configurations

This allows you to run development server, tests and so on via Pycharm Run... command without ImproperlyConfigured:

• Open Run Configuration window - Run menu - Edit Configurations... or Alt + Shift + F10 - 0
• Add Django Server (for example) via Alt + Insert
• Find Environment Variable block and click ... button to the right
• Here you can specify names and values of the desired environment variables, note copy and paste buttons, they can be pretty useful

Python and Django Console

This will prevent ImproperlyConfigured upon opening Python console:

• Open File menu - Settings - Build, Execution, Deployment - Console
• There you have Django and Python consoles, you can specify any environment variable you want to load with them

manage.py Pycharm Settings

This will prevent ImproperlyConfigured exception upon opening manage.py Pycharm console (Ctrl + Shift + R):

• File - Settings - Languages & Frameworks - Django - Environment variables

Setting Environment Variables with virtualenvwrapper Scripts

virtualenvwrapper provides really useful bash scripts, that will be executed upon virtualenv start, stop and so on. They are easy to use, we just need to export our environment variables to the global space right after virtualenv activation and to unset them upon virtualenv deactivation:

• workon <your_virtualenv_name>
• cdvirtualenv - to cd virtualenv folder (you can do it manually for sure)
• cd bin - here we have out bash scripts
• Add to postactivate this line: export ENV_NAME="env_value" where ENV_NAME is desired variable name, and end_value - it's value, copy this line if you need to setup few variables
• Add to predeactivate this line (or lines): unset ENV_NAME for each ENV_NAME you add to postactivate

Requirements

Installation

• Python 3+
• Virtualenv usage is recommended
• To install requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt or pip-sync (pip-tools is required)

Update

• Install pip-tools
• Update requirements.in
• Compile requirements.txt by running pip-compile requirements.in

Testing

Tests

All integration tests:

python3 mysite/manage.py test blog.tests

Acceptance tests (selenium, Firefox is required), will take a while (but pretty fun to watch):

python3 mysite/manage.py test functional_tests

PLEASE NOTE: My acceptance tests are rather fragile and can fail due to some silly causes depends on OS and so on. If it's your case - consider to report an issue, I would love to fix it.

Syntax Validation

python3 -m pylint mysite/blog/ mysite/functional_tests/

Misc

If you have any questions - feel free to ask me, I would love to help fellow learner! The book is awesome, but I found few typos/misleading notes so can probably you.