Installing and testing Django

Django is a web development framework for python. It eases your development time and makes web development a real joy. In this article I'll show you how to install Django and test it, given you already have python installed in Linux. Installing Django is a simple step and it's a single command.

$ sudo pip install django

It assumes you have python-pip module installed. If not install it using the following command.

sudo apt-get install python-pip        // In Debian Linux/Ubuntu

sudo yum install python-pip         // In Red Hat and Fedora

After installing you can check whether everything is setup properly. Use the following commands.

$ python
Python 2.7.8 (default, Nov 10 2014, 08:19:18)
[GCC 4.9.2 20141101 (Red Hat 4.9.2-1)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import django
>>> print django.VERSION
(1, 7, 7, 'final', 0)

Let's start off with setting up a default project to see the Django in work.

Create a directory of your choice. Say $HOME/DjangoProjects.

Navigate to that directory and issue the following command.

$ django-admin.py startproject mysite     // Here 'mysite' is your project name

This will create a directory called mysite, inside which you'll find a file named manage.py and another directory named 'mysite' which in turn contains four files; namely, __init__.py, setting.py, urls,py and wsgi.py.

Let's not bog down into details of what these files are all about. You can find detailed information in the Django web site https://www.djangoproject.com/

Let's start the Django's test server for this default site. (This server is merely for testing and not recommended to use in production). Type the following to start the server.

$ python manage.py runserver 9876

This should start run the server on port 9876. To see the welcome page, open a browser and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:9876/.

Hope this was a good starting point for you to learn Django. Enjoy working with Django.