Beginner's Guide: Starting a Django Project in Visual Studio Code

Hello Guys,

I am back with my next post of the blog series - “ Python Development in Visual Studio Code - Quick Tour ”. This has taken a while as I was busy with Indian festivities. But enough holidays, let’s get back to where we left off. This blog post is entirely based on working with Django in VS Code. Django is the web application development framework for Python. With Django, you can take Web applications from concept to launch in a matter of hours. Django takes care of much of the hassle of Web development, so you can focus on writing your app without needing to reinvent the wheel. It’s free and open source. Here, I will be showing the basic steps to start a project in Django from its installation till creating a sample app using VS Code. This post is only about setting up of the basic Django development environment in VS Code and not about learning Django. For learning Django in details, please follow the Django Official documentation .

Let’s get started:

Prerequisite: 
1. To set up/install VS Code for Python development, follow my blog post here:Beginner's Guide: Python in Visual Studio Code (For Ubuntu)

2. To setup a Virtual environment and why you should use it, follow my blog post here:Beginner’s Guide: Setting up the virtual environment in VS Code for different Python-based projects.

Now, let’s start with Django in your created Virtual Environment.

Install Django in the virtual environment by running following commands in the VS Code Terminal. Note the “(myenv)” at the beginning of line. This means that whatever we are going to do from here, we are doing it in our virtual environment:

$ python -m pip install django

This will install Django framework:

 Creating the Django Project:

Considering the fact that you guys are familar with Django Programing, let’s get right to the point of creating the Django project.

• Run the following command in your activated virtual environment in VS Code Terminal:

$ django-admin startproject mysite .

        

 By making use of “.” at the end will create your django project “mysite” within the current folder “myproject”.

 Running the command startproject in your VS Code terminal will create following files in mysite:

myproject /  

manage.py   

 mysite/     

__init__.py       

settings.py      

urls.py       

wsgi.py

 These files are:

•  manage.py: A command-line utility that lets you interact with this Django project in various ways.

• The mysite/ directory is the actual Python package for your project. Its name is the Python package name you’ll need to use to import anything inside it (e.g. mysite.urls).

• mysite/__init__.py: An empty file that tells Python that this directory should be considered a Python package

•  mysite/settings.py: Settings/configuration for this Django project.

•  mysite/urls.py: The URL declarations for this Django project; a “table of contents” of your Django-powered site.

•  mysite/wsgi.py: An entry-point for WSGI-compatible web servers to serve your project.

For more details please look into Official Django documentation

 Checking the development server:

For verifying that your django project works, let’s change into the outer myproject directory, if you haven’t already, and run the following commands:

 

$ python manage.py runserver

 

You’ll see the following output in the terminal:

 

Ctrl+click to follow the link and you will see the following page in your browser

 Creating the Django app

To create your app, make sure you’re in the same folder as manage.py and type this command:

$ python manage.py startapp myapp

 

This will create:

 Now you are good to go to create your views, models, templates as per your application development and as your code required.

Bye for now, I will be back soon with my next blog.Till then keep quenching your thirst for CODE... Thanks for your valuable time. Have a nice day :-) 😄

Note: THE INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS POST IS "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.