Creating a Project - Django Workshop

Open PyCharm and start a new project by clicking Create New Project from the welcome screen or New Project... from the File menu.

In the Location box, replace untitled with mysite. Under Project Interpreter make sure Virtualenv is selected.

If you have PyCharm Professional Edition you will see a Django option when creating a new project. We won't use it during this workshop but you may wish to try it on your own as it simplifies the setup of Django projects.

In the bottom of the window, open the Terminal pane. Enter the following command to install Django:

pip install django

Once pip has finished installing Django, create a new Django project by executing:

django-admin startproject main .

In the Project pane on the left you will see a folder called main and a file called manage.py. The manage.py is used to execute Django management commands like creating admin users and running database migrations.

Next we will create what is known as a Django app. In the Django context, an app is a component of a website site. Apps are used to provide structure to a project and to group files into re-usable parts.

Create an app called blog by running the following command:

python manage.py startapp blog

You will now see a folder called blog. Inside the blog folder Django has created some files to scaffold your app. These are mostly empty now but we will add some content to them shortly. The following table summaries the intention behind each file:

File	Purpose
`views.py`	functions and classes that handle requests made to your website
`models.py`	classes for interacting with your database
`admin.py`	classes for configuring the Django admin interface
`apps.py`	used to configure the app
`tests.py`	a place to write automated tests for your app

To install your blog app into your Django project, open main/settings.py and at the end of the INSTALLED_APPS list add 'blog'. It should look like:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'blog',
]

You can now run your site by executing:

python manage.py runserver

Go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in web browser to see your site.

The IP address 127.0.0.1 refers to your computer. 8000 is an arbitrary port chosen by Django. If you wanted to run multiple Django projects on the same computer at the same time you would configure them to listen on different ports.

Open a second terminal by clicking the + next to the Local tab in the terminal pane at the bottom of PyCharm. In this new terminal, run the following command to see some of the other django management commands that are available:
```
python manage.py help
```
You can get more information about a command with
```
python manage.py help COMMAND
```
For example:
```
python manage.py help runserver
```

Django Workshop

Creating a New Django Project

Challenges