Book Image

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Aidas Bendoraitis
Book Image

Web Development with Django Cookbook- Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Aidas Bendoraitis

Overview of this book

Django is a web framework that was designed to strike a balance between rapid web development and high performance. It has the capacity to handle applications with high levels of user traffic and interaction, and can integrate with massive databases on the backend, constantly collecting and processing data in real time. Through this book, you'll discover that collecting data from different sources and providing it to others in different formats isn't as difficult as you thought. It follows a task-based approach to guide you through all the web development processes using the Django framework. We’ll start by setting up the virtual environment for a Django project and configuring it. Then you’ll learn to write reusable pieces of code for your models and find out how to manage database schema changes using South migrations. After that, we’ll take you through working with forms and views to enter and list data. With practical examples on using templates and JavaScript together, you will discover how to create the best user experience. In the final chapters, you'll be introduced to some programming and debugging tricks and finally, you will be shown how to test and deploy the project to a remote dedicated server. By the end of this book, you will have a good understanding of the new features added to Django 1.8 and be an expert at web development processes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Web Development with Django Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up cron jobs for regular tasks


Usually websites have some management tasks to do in the background once in a week, day, or every hour. This can be achieved using cron jobs that are also known as scheduled tasks. These are scripts that run on the server for the specified period of time. In this recipe, we will create two cron jobs: one to clear sessions from the database and another to back up the database data. Both will be run every night.

Getting ready

To start with, deploy your Django project on to a remote server. Then, connect to the server by SSH.

How to do it...

Let's create the two scripts and make them run regularly by following these steps:

  1. Create the commands, db_backups and logs directories in your project's home directory:

    (myproject)myproject@server$ mkdir commands
    (myproject)myproject@server$ mkdir db_backups
    (myproject)myproject@server$ mkdir logs
    
  2. In the commands directory, create a cleanup.sh file with the following content:

    # /home/myproject/commands/cleanup.sh
    #! /usr...