Using Django 1.6?

Check out the new, updated version of this post with Django 1.6 specific changes and updates.

Back in February, I wrote a post titled 'Starting a Django Project the Right Way', which still draws a consistent audience eight months later. In those eight months, Django has released version 1.4 of the framework, with 1.5 under active development and promising experimental support for Python 3.x. Given these changes, as well as the availability of new and updated resources available to Django developers, I decided to revisit the concept of best practices when starting a Django project.

The beginning of a project is a critical time. Choices are made that have long term consequences. There are a number of tutorials about how to get started with the Django framework, but few that discuss how to use Django in a professional way, using industry accepted best practices to make sure your project development scales as your application grows. A small bit of planning goes a long way towards making your life easier in the future.

By the end of this post, you will have

1. A fully functional Django 1.4 project
2. All resources under source control (with git or Mercurial)
3. Automated regression and unit testing (using the unittest library)
4. An environment independent install of your project (using virtualenv)
5. Automated deployment and testing (using Fabric)
6. Automatic database migrations (using South)
7. A development work flow that scales with your site.

None of these steps, except for perhaps the first, are covered in the official tutorial. They should be. If you're looking to start a new, production ready Django 1.4 project, look no further.

Prerequisites

A working knowledge of Python is assumed. Also, some prior experience with Django would be incredibly helpful, but not strictly necessary. You'll need git or Mercurial for version control. That's it!

Preparing To Install

I'm assuming you have Python installed. If you don't head over to python.org and find the install instructions for your architecture/os. I'll be running on a 64-bit Ubuntu server installation hosted by Linode, with whom I'm very happy.

So, what's the first step? Install Django, right? Not quite. One common problem with installing packages directly to your current site-packages area is that, if you have more than one project or use Python on your machine for things other than Django, you may run into dependency issues between your applications and the installed packages. For this reason, we'll be using virtualenv and the excellent extension virtualenvwrapper to manage our Django installation. This is common, and recommended, practice among Python and Django users.

If you're using pip to install packages (and I can't see why you wouldn't), you can get both virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper by simply installing the latter.

$ pip install virtualenvwrapper

After it's installed, add the following lines to your shell's start-up file (.zshrc, .bashrc, .profile, etc).

export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
export PROJECT_HOME=$HOME/directory-you-do-development-in
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

Reload your start up file (e.g. source .zshrc) and you're ready to go.

Creating a new environment

Creating a virtual environment is simple. Just type

$ mkvirtualenv django_project

where "django_project" is whatever name you give to your project.

You'll notice a few things happen right away: * Your shell is prepended by "(django_project)" * distribute and pip were automatically installed

This is an extremely helpful part of virtualenvwrapper: it automatically prepares your environment in a way that lets you start installing packages using pip right away. The "(django_project)" portion is a reminder that you're using a virtualenv instead of your system's Python installation. To exit the virtual environment, simply type deactivate. When you want to resume work on your project, it's as easy as workon django_project. Note that unlike the vanilla virtualenv tool, where you run these commands doesn't matter.

Installing Django

"Wait, 'Installing Django'? I already have Django installed!" Fantastic. You aren't going to use it. Instead, we'll use one managed by virtualenv that can't be messed up by other users (or yourself) working elsewhere on the machine. To install Django under virtualenv, just type:

$ pip install django

This should give you the latest version of Django which will be installed in your virtualenv area. You can confirm this by doing:

$ which django-admin.py

Which should point to your $HOME/.virtualenvs/ directory. If it doesn't, make sure you see "(django_project)" before your prompt. If you don't, activate the virtualenv using workon django_project.

Setting Up The Project

Before we actually start the project, we need to have a little talk. I've spoken to a number of Django developers over the past few months and the ones having the most difficulty are those that don't use a version control system. Many new developers have simply never been exposed to version control. Others think that since "this is a small project," that it's not necessary. Wrong.

None of the tools listed here will pay greater dividends then the use of a version control system.

Previously, I only mentioned git as a (D)VCS. However, this project being in Python, Mercurial is a worthy Python based alternative. Both are popular enough that learning resources abound online. Make sure you have either git or Mercurial installed. Both are almost certainly available via your distro's packaging system.

If you plan on using git, GitHub is an obvious choice for keeping a remote repository. With Mercurial, Atlassian's Bitbucket is a fine choice (it supports git as well, so you could use it in either case).

(source) Controlling Your Environment

Even though we haven't actually done anything yet, we know we're going to want everything under source control. We have two types of 'things' we're going to be committing: our code itself (including templates, etc) and supporting files like database fixtures, South migrations (more on that later), and a requirements file. In the old post, I recommended committing your actual virtualenv, but there are a few good reasons not to, not the least of which is it's unnecessary. Using a requirements file gives you all of the benefits with none of the overhead.

Let's go ahead and create our project directory. Use the new startproject command for django_admin.py to get it set up.

$ django_admin.py startproject django_project

We'll see a single directory created: django_project. Within the django_project directory, we'll see another django_project directory containing the usual suspects: settings.py, urls.py, and wsgi.py. At the same level as the second django_project directory is manage.py.

Intermezzo: Projects vs. Apps

You may be wondering why the new startproject command was added alongside the existing startapp command. The answer lies in the difference between Django "projects" and Django "apps", which are clearly delineated in Django 1.4. Briefly, a project is an entire web site or application. An "app" is a small, (hopefully) self-contained Django application that can be used in any Django project. If you're building a blogging application called "Super Blogger", then "Super Blogger" is your Django project. If "Super Blogger" support reader polls, the "polls" would be an Django app used by "Super Blogger". The idea is that your polls app should be able to be reused in any Django project requiring user polls, not just within "Super Blogger". A project is a collection of apps, along with project specific logic. An app can be used in multiple projects.

While your natural inclination might be to include a lot of "Super Blogger" specific code and information within your "polls" app, avoiding this has a number of benefits. Based on the principle of loose coupling, writing your apps as standalone entities prevents design decisions and bugs in your project directly affecting your app. It also means that, if you wanted to, you could pass of the development of any of your apps to another developer without them needing to access or make changes to your main project.

Like many things in software development, it takes a bit of effort but pays huge dividends later.

Setting up our repos

Since we have some "code" in our project now (really just some stock scripts and empty config files, but bear with me), now is as good a time as any to initialize our repositories in source control. Below are the steps to do this in git and Mercurial.

git

$ git init

This creates a git repository in the current directory. Lets stage all of our files to git to be committed.

$ git add django_project

Now we actually commit them to our new repo:

$ git commit -m 'Initial commit of django_project'

Mercurial

$ hg init

This creates a Mercurial repository in the current directory. Lets stage all of our files to git to be committed.

$ hg add django_project

Now we actually commit them to our new repo:

$ hg commit -m 'Initial commit of django_project'

If you plan on using a service like GitHub or Bitbucket, now would be a good time to push to them.

Using South for Database Migrations

One of the most frustrating aspects of Django is managing changes to models and the associated changes to the database. With the help of South, you can realistically create an entire application without ever writing database specific code. Changes to your models are detected and automatically made in the database through a migration file that South creates. This lets you both migrate the database forward for your new change and backwards to undo a change or series of changes. It makes your life so much easier, it's a wonder it's not included in the Django distribution (there has been some talk of including a database migration tool in Django, but it hasn't happened yet).

Still in our virtualenv, install South like so:

$ pip install south

We setup South by adding it to our INSTALLED_APS in the settings.py file for the project. Add that now, as well as your database settings for the project, then run python manage.py syncdb. You'll be prompted for a superuser name and password (which you can go ahead and enter). More importantly, South has setup the database with the tables it needs.

You may have noticed that we just ran syncdb without having adding an app to the project. We do this first so that South is installed from the beginning. All migrations to our own apps will be done using South, including the initial migration.

Since we've just made some pretty big changes, now would be a good time to commit. You should get used to committing frequently, as the more granular the commit, the more freedom you have in choosing something to revert to if things go wrong.

To commit, lets see what has changed.

(git)

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes not staged for commit:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#       modified:   django_project/settings.py
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       django_project/.settings.py.swp
#       django_project/__init__.pyc
#       django_project/settings.pyc

(Mercurial)

$ hg status
M django_project/django_project/settings.py
? django_project/django_project/.settings.py.swp
? django_project/django_project/__init__.pyc
? django_project/django_project/settings.pyc

With both git and Mercurial, you may notice files you don't ever want committed, like the compiled Python .pyc files and vim swap .swp files above. To ignore these files, create a .gitignore or .hgignore file in your root project directory and add a shell pattern to match files you don't want to be tracked. For example, the contents of my file might be

*.pyc
.*swp

Before we commit, we have one more piece of information to track: our installed Python packages. We want to track the name and version of the Python packages we're using so that we can seamlessly recreate our environment in our production area. Helpfully, pip has a command that does exactly what we need.

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

I piped the output to a file called requirements.txt, which we'll add to source control so we always have an updated list of what packages are being used.

Let's stage and commit our settings.py and requirements.txt files to be committed by running

$ (git/hg) add django_project/settings.py requirements.txt
$ (git/hg) commit -m 'Added South for database migrations'

Creating Our App

Use manage.py to create an app in the normal way (python manage.py startapp myapp) and add it as an INSTALLED_APP. The first thing we'll do, before adding models, is tell South we want to use it for migrations:

$ python manage.py schemamigration myapp --initial

This creates a migration file that can be used to apply our changes (if we had any) and also revert them. We use the migration file to migrate the database changes (even though there are none) using :

$ python manage.py migrate myapp

South is smart enough to know where to look for migration files, as well as remember the last migration we did. You can specify individual migration files, but it's usually not necessary.

When we eventually make changes to our model, we ask South to create a migration using:

$ python manage.py schemamigration myapp --auto

This will inspect the models in myapp and automatically add, delete, or modify the database tables accordingly. Changes can then be applied to the database using the migrate command as above.

Our Development Area

One of the things you should get used to is doing development in an area separate from where you're serving your files from, for obvious reasons. git and Mercurial make this simple and also help with deployments. Create a directory somewhere other than where django_project is installed for your development area (I just call it dev).

In your development directory, clone the current project using git or Mercurial:

$ (git/hg) clone /path/to/my/project/

Both tools will create an exact copy of the entire repository. All changes, branches, and history will be available here. From here on out, you should be working from your development directory.

Since branching with both git and Mercurial is so easy and cheap, create branches as you work on new, orthogonal changes to your site. Here's how to do it each tool:

(git)

$ git checkout -b <branchname>

Which will both create a new branch named and check it out. Almost all of your development should be done on a branch, so that master mimics the current production master and can be used for recovery at any time.

(Mercurial)

$ hg branch <branchname>

Note that branching is kind of a contentious topic within the Mercurial community, as there are a number of options available but no "obviously correct" choice. Here, I use a named branch, which is probably the safest and most informative style of branching. Any commits after the branch command are done on the branch.

Using Fabric for Deployment

So we have the makings of a Django application. How do we deploy it? Fabric. For a reasonable sized project, discussing anything else is a waste of time. Fabric can be used for a number of purposes, but it really shines in deployments.

$ pip install fabric

Fabric expects a fabfile named fabfile.py which defines all of the actions we can take. Let's create that now. Put the following in fabfile.py in your project's root directory.

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from fabric.api import local

def prepare_deployment(branch_name):
    local('python manage.py test django_project')
    local('git add -p && git commit') # or local('hg add && hg commit')

This will run the tests and commit your changes, but only if your tests pass. At this point, a simple "pull" in your production area becomes your deployment. Lets add a bit more to actually deploy. Add this to your fabfile.py:

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from fabric.api import lcd, local

def deploy():
    with lcd('/path/to/my/prod/area/'):

        # With git...
        local('git pull /my/path/to/dev/area/')

        # With Mercurial...
        local('hg pull /my/path/to/dev/area/')
        local('hg update')

        # With both
        local('python manage.py migrate myapp')
        local('python manage.py test myapp')
        local('/my/command/to/restart/webserver')

This will pull your changes from the development master branch, run any migrations you've made, run your tests, and restart your web server. All in one simple command from the command line. If one of those steps fails, the script stops and reports what happened. Once you fix the issue, there is no need to run the steps manually. Since they're idempotent, you can simply rerun the deploy command and all will be well.

Note that the code above assumes you're developing on the same machine you deploy on. If that's not the case, the file would be mostly the same but would use Fabric's run function instead of local. See the Fabric documentation for details.

So now that we have our fabfile.py created, how do we actually deploy? Simple. Just run:

$ fab prepare_deployment
$ fab deploy

Technically, these could be combined into a single command, but I find it's better to explicitly prepare your deployment and then deploy as it makes you focus a bit more on what you're doing.

Enjoy Your New Django Application

That's it! You're ready to start your actual development. If you do a lot of Django development, just dump all of the commands above into a fabfile and make creating a proper Django app a one step process. I have one which I'll upload to my GitHub account later. If you have any questions or corrections, or think there's a tool/step I missed, feel free to email me at jeff@jeffknupp.com or leave a comment below. Follow me on Twitter to get all of the latest blog updates!