Chapter 1: Setting up the Virtual Environment
A good programmer is not afraid of technology because their confidence doesn’t lie in the programming language, but in their own skills and experience. Tools only make them more productive. We can’t build even the simplest website in an acceptable amount of time without the right software. Building websites with Python is possible on any modern operating system, regardless of the hardware behind it. The core team that maintains this fantastic language already takes care of some of the more tedious tasks, such as compiling it and optimizing it for the processor you’re using.
However, building a web application in Python, even if we only respond with plain text, requires a great deal of knowledge, including of servers and web applications as well as the WSGI or ASGI interface. We need to abstract that complexity to respond to requests, environments, asynchrony, WebSocket, database connections, and the other elements that define a current web application. That’s why we’re going to set up a desktop with everything you need to be a productive modern Django developer. We will build different real-time applications using the technology offered by Channels, a Django extension (developed by the same Django team), which includes a WebSocket server and WebSocket integrations. The architecture of the applications will differ from how server-side rendering works. The communication path between the server and the client will be bidirectional, allowing us to use it to receive or send events and/or HTML. My intention is that upon finishing the chapter, your focus will be on the code and not on complex configurations that may distract you. To achieve this, we will make use of Docker, the famous container manager, which will open up the possibility of adding all kinds of software already precooked to launch without investing practically any time: databases, web servers, mail servers, and caches, among others. Don’t worry if you have no experience with Docker. I’ll teach you the basics without going into low-level details. After a few tweaks, you’ll practically forget that it’s running in the background.
It’s important not only that we know how to write Python and create real-time infrastructures with Django but also that we have the skills to be independent of the operating system when deploying or working in a team. By virtualizing (or isolating) the processes, we can remain unconcerned about the operating system where it runs, making the project easy to continue for any specialist, and we can anticipate future problems that may occur when deploying to a production server.
In this chapter, we’ll be covering the following topics:
- Exploring the software required
- Adding dependencies
- Configuring the IDE
- Installing Django
- Creating our project