Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications that stand out from the crowd without spending hours on boilerplate code? You’ve made the right choice trusting the Django framework, and this book will tell you why. Often referred to as a “batteries included” web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django will take you through all the essential concepts and help you explore its power to build real-world applications using Python. Throughout the book, you’ll get the grips with the major features of Django by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you advance, you'll acquire various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. You’ll cover everyday tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this Django book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively develop and deploy your own projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Environment variables

When we create a program, we often want the user to be able to configure some of its behavior. For example, say you have a program that connects to a database and saves all the records it finds into a file. Normally, it would probably print out just a success message to the terminal, but you might also want to run it in debug mode, which also makes it print out all the SQL statements it is executing.

There are many ways of configuring a program like this. For example, you could have it read from a configuration file. But in some cases, the user may quickly want to run the Django server with a particular setting on (say, debug mode), and then run the server again with the same setting off. Having to change the configuration file every time can be inconvenient. In this case, we can read from an environment variable. Environment variables are key-value pairs that can be set in your operating system and then read by a program. There are several ways they can be...