Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Arun Ravindran
Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Arun Ravindran

Overview of this book

Building secure and maintainable web applications requires comprehensive knowledge. The second edition of this book not only sheds light on Django, but also encapsulates years of experience in the form of design patterns and best practices. Rather than sticking to GoF design patterns, the book looks at higher-level patterns. Using the latest version of Django and Python, you’ll learn about Channels and asyncio while building a solid conceptual background. The book compares design choices to help you make everyday decisions faster in a rapidly changing environment. You’ll first learn about various architectural patterns, many of which are used to build Django. You’ll start with building a fun superhero project by gathering the requirements, creating mockups, and setting up the project. Through project-guided examples, you’ll explore the Model, View, templates, workflows, and code reusability techniques. In addition to this, you’ll learn practical Python coding techniques in Django that’ll enable you to tackle problems related to complex topics such as legacy coding, data modeling, and code reusability. You’ll discover API design principles and best practices, and understand the need for asynchronous workflows. During this journey, you’ll study popular Python code testing techniques in Django, various web security threats and their countermeasures, and the monitoring and performance of your application.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Finding the Django Version


Ideally, every project will have a requirements.txt or setup.py file at the root directory, and it will have the exact Version of Django used for that project. Let's look for a line similar to this:

Django==1.5.9 

Note

The version number is mentioned precisely (rather than Django>=1.5.9), which is called pinning. Pinning every package is considered a good practice since it reduces surprises and makes your build more deterministic.

As a best practice, it is advisable to create a completely repeatable environment for a project. This includes having a requirements file with all transitive dependencies listed, pinning, and with --hash digests. --hash digests of the packages look like this:

Django==1.5.9 --hash=sha256:2cf24dba5fb0a30e26e83b2ac5... 

Hashes protect against remote tampering and save the need to create private package index servers containing approved packages.

Unfortunately, there are real-world code bases where the requirements.txt file was not updated or...