What’s Django?

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Django is one of the most popular Python Web Frameworks. It has very useful web page. Visit it by clicking on this link. Because you will need to work with Python packages, write this command to your command line.

$ sudo dnf install python3-pip

Get started

How to install virtualenv

It’s recommended to keep your project inside virtual environment. But you can skip this step if you want. Enter this command to your command line for installation:

$ sudo dnf install python3-virtualenv

Get inside your working directory or create new where you want to store your virtual environment:

$ mkdir working-dir
$ cd working-dir

Now we will create virtual environment called venv inside this directory using following command:

$ virtualenv venv

When it’s done, we will activate our virtualenv. Now we will use following commands:

$ cd venv
$ source bin/activate

When it’s activated we will see indicator of same name as our virtualenv. Now we will check if we really have empty environment:

$ pip freeze

It will return nothing.

How to install Django

Now if you installed virtualenv do not leave it, we will install Django now. If you installed virtualenv use this command inside your working directory with activated virtualenv:

$ pip3 install django

If you are following a book or a tutorial, you might want to specify the same exact version like this

$ pip3 install django==1.10

Of course you can use the version that is prepared by Fedora community by typing:

$ sudo dnf install python3-django

and when it’s finished use following command to start your first project called mysite:

$ django-admin startproject mysite

Now if you will check your directory using ls you will see new directory called mysite. We will go inside that directory and we will run our project by following commands:

$ cd mysite/
$ python3 manage.py runserver

You will see message with information about your development server. When you insert URL into your browser, you will see welcome page (default URL for development server is http://127.0.0.1:8000/). And you successfully started your first Django project.

Switching Virtualenvs

You can use virtualenvwrapper after installing it with usual command

$ sudo dnf install python3-virtualenvwrapper

$ mkvirtualenv env1
$ mkvirtualenv env2
$ workon env1
$ workon env2

Authors: Abhishek Kumar Roy, Adam Samalik, Jarek Prokop, Nick Dirschel, alsadi