Django Setup

is my default setup I use for many projects. As such I always run through the same steps to setup the basics, from django, over S3 for statics, HTML5 + Twitter-Bootstrap for the frontend up to many django contribs I use like South, Userena and the gunicorn environment around it.

So I started this repository with the basic setup to reuse and share. It contains all the things making life much easier and setup (for AWS) what it is supposed to be: a one second thing.

Pre-Setup

This repository relies on a few submodules to include and derive from. So don't forget to run:

$ git submodule init

$ git submodule update

Setting up

The setup runs in a virtualenv environment. So you should first run

$ virtualenv .

$ source bin/activate

$ pip -r requirements.txt

Time for a first test run!

$ python app/manage.py runserver

And you should be able to access a simple Webpage at

http://localhost:8000/

Settings

Now, you might want to change the config in app/settings.py . Please take care that the app/settings_debug.py might overwrites some data in order to make the manage.py script better locally.

Running for real

Before you can start developing, don't forget to sync the database.

$ python app/manage.py syncdb

and migrate some script

$ python app/manage.py migrate

Now you can actually see the database when you try to go to /admin

Understading Less and JS

In order to develop with this repository correctly, you might want to understand the underlying ideas and structures. For as many things as possible this repository just pulls in external data and inkludes them via symlink. You can see that at app/less and at app/static/js/lib/ .

Let's take a short look at the app/less. You'll find two files not symlinked:

• styles.less
• variables.less

The first is there to allow you to modify the loading of the bootstrap and add your own styles - it is the only style file referenced from the HTML.

The variables.less allows you to overwrite any variables set for bootstrap, while containing an upstream compatible inklude model. The first thing that file does is inkluding the original variables file. In order to show this, the variables.less is currently setting a different background color.

Understanding the Django-Setup

The Django setup inkludes alread many contribs, like S3 and South, as you've probably noticed when adapting the settings-file. This setup also ships with a few helpers inside the base-project. One of them being a very basic Userena UserProfile-Model (setup by default) and some handy context processor and helpers in the utils module. Read them, they are good helpers!

The templates can be found in app/templates. Don't forget to include the site.html. The base.html is inkluded by many contribs (like Userena) and allows you to set a slightly different style for those (for e.g. put a box around the content).

Have fun!