hendra.dev - Basic Django Web Application

For the past few weeks, I have been writing quite a lot in PHP, more specifically, CodeIgniter, and to be honest, writing web applications in CodeIgniter is really easy and intuitive, and even though I came across the MVC pattern (or MVT, for that matter) for the first time in Django, I quickly forgotten even the basics of Django. So, in to prevent myself from forgetting something like this again in the future, I am writing this blogpost, to explain the basic of rendering a web page with Django. I will only explain the most necessary functionality, so that means I will use shortcuts whenever possible, and I wont be using any model in this example, maybe I’ll write that sometime in the future.

Okay, lets start. First of, after installing the django, run django-admin.py startproject basicDjango to start a new project. Next, move into the project directory, and create a new folder named templates. This will be the folder you use to store the template files for the project. We will come back here again later. Now, open up settings.py and find the line for TEMPLATE_DIRS, and add the path to the template directory there. Next, on your project’s root directory level, create a new file named views.py. Open up the file, and enter these code which are the basic functionalities that are in a view function:

:::python
# import the necessary modules
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

def index(request):
    # render the template index.html with the context
    # text equals to hello world
    return render_to_response('index.html',{‘title’:’Index Page’,'text':'Hello, World!'})

The way it works is, it loads up the template file(index.html), and will replace the special tags in the template file with dictionary data you passed in the second argument. Next, create the template file itself, in the templates folder that you made before, create a new file index.html, and put this inside it:

:::html
<html>
    <head>
        <title>{{title}}</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>{{text}}</h1>
    </body>
</html>

Now, you got everything setup, and now, you just need to route the request to the view function to handle, so to do that, open up urls.py, and add this to the url pattern:

:::python
import views
urlpatterns = patterns('',(r'^hello/$',views.index),)

Now, you can run python manage.py runserver, and navigate to your browser to http://localhost:8000/hello, and you should see the word ‘Hello World’ printed out.

Note: If you are on windows, make sure the template paths are written with forward slashes ‘/’. That’s all for now, but I think I will make another post about how the Template system works in django without shortcuts, and also about the model. Well, maybe next time.