Book Image

Django 4 By Example - Fourth Edition

By : Antonio Melé
4.6 (5)
Book Image

Django 4 By Example - Fourth Edition

4.6 (5)
By: Antonio Melé

Overview of this book

Django 4 By Example is the 4th edition of the best-selling franchise that helps you build web apps. This book will walk you through the creation of real-world applications, solving common problems, and implementing best practices using a step-by-step approach. You'll cover a wide range of web app development topics as you build four different apps: A blog application: Create data models, views, and URLs and implement an admin site for your blog. Create sitemaps and RSS feeds and implement a full-text search engine with PostgreSQL. A social website: Implement authentication with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Create user profiles, image thumbnails, a bookmarklet, and an activity stream. Implement a user follower system and add infinite scroll pagination to your website. An e-commerce application: Build a product catalog, a shopping cart, and asynchronous tasks with Celery and RabbitMQ. Process payments with Stripe and manage payment notifications via webhooks. Build a product recommendation engine with Redis. Create PDF invoices and export orders to CSV. An e-learning platform: Create a content management system to manage polymorphic content. Cache content with Memcached and Redis. Build and consume a RESTful API. Implement a real-time chat using WebSockets with ASGI. Create a production environment using NGINX, uWSGI and Daphne with Docker Compose. This is a practical book that will have you creating web apps quickly.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
Other Books You May Enjoy
19
Index

Generating PDF invoices dynamically

Now that you have a complete checkout and payment system, you can generate a PDF invoice for each order. There are several Python libraries to generate PDF files. One popular library to generate PDFs with Python code is ReportLab. You can find information about how to output PDF files with ReportLab at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/howto/outputting-pdf/.

In most cases, you will have to add custom styles and formatting to your PDF files. You will find it more convenient to render an HTML template and convert it into a PDF file, keeping Python away from the presentation layer. You are going to follow this approach and use a module to generate PDF files with Django. You will use WeasyPrint, which is a Python library that can generate PDF files from HTML templates.

Installing WeasyPrint

First, install WeasyPrint’s dependencies for your operating system from https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/first_steps.html....