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)

Introduction to Static Files Finder

There are three times when Django needs to locate static files on disk, and for this, it uses static file finder. It can be thought of as a plugin. It is a class that implements methods for converting URL paths into disks and iterates through the project directory to find static files.

The first time Django does this is when the Django static view receives a request to load a particular static file; here, it needs to convert the path in the URL into a location on disk. For example, let’s say the URL’s path is /static/logo.png, and it is converted into the bookr/static/logo.png path on the disk. As we noted in the previous section, this only happens during development. On a production server, Django should not receive this request as it will be handled directly by the web server.

The second time is when using the collectstatic management command. This gathers all the static files in the project directory and copies them to a single...