Chapter 1: Undertaking a Colossal Project

Considering the increasing complexity of applications and websites these days, this chapter will introduce you to what it takes to tackle a colossal project of your own. We will explore the concepts of enterprise-level development, and then take a peek at the many different paths we could take. We will discuss methods and tools that help us to draft plans for a project, essentially building the blueprints that we will need to get started. Every project also needs hardware for its software to live on, so we will be exploring what service options are available to provide the hardware we need. Of the options provided, we will settle upon one choice for a hosting provider and demonstrate working with that provider throughout this book.

The project itself can be used with any hosting provider or even run on a self-built server; however, keep in mind that certain settings may be configured specifically for the host that we will be using. By the end of this chapter, we will have created a hosting account with the provider chosen and picked the simplest, free plan for use with this book. We will also be creating and configuring multiple working environments on that hosting plan for the code to run in. We will also connect each environment in that hosting plan to a remote repository, keeping the code in a safe place.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

• Building an enterprise
• Designing and planning
• Hosting and deployment

Most people would suggest using a UNIX- or Linux-based operating system, such as Ubuntu or macOS, when working with Django. Django is built to be so versatile that the concepts and code examples that will be demonstrated throughout the course of this book can run on all three major platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and beyond. Personally, I have been using Django on a Windows-based machine ever since I started to learn and work directly with this framework. I did so because I came from a Windows background; about half of my jobs provided the equipment or mandated the use of certain software on a Windows-based machine. Later on, more and more companies started to give developers the choice to work on whatever machine they were most comfortable with. I continued to choose Windows because I was already familiar with it.