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)

dj-database-url

dj-database-url is another app that helps with the configuration of your Django application. Specifically, it allows you to set the database (that your Django app connects to) using a URL instead of a dictionary of configuration values. As you can see in your existing settings.py file, the DATABASES setting contains a couple of items and gets more verbose when using a different database that has more configuration options (for username, password, and so on). We can instead set these from a URL, which can contain all these values.

The URL’s format will differ slightly, depending on whether you are using a local SQLite database or a remote database server. To use SQLlite on disk (as Bookr is currently), the URL is like this:

sqlite:///<path>

Note there are three slashes present. This is because SQLite doesn’t have a hostname, so this is like a URL being like this:

<protocol>://<hostname>/<path>

That is, the URL has...