Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. 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 takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features 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 that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn 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. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

5. Serving Static Files

Overview

In this chapter, you will start by learning the difference between static and dynamic responses. You will then see how the Django staticfiles app helps manage static files. Continuing work on the Bookr app, you will enhance it with images and CSS. You'll learn the different ways you can lay out your static files for your project and examine how Django consolidates them for production deployment. Django includes tools to reference static files in templates and you'll see how these tools help reduce the amount of work needed when deploying an application to production. After this, you'll explore the findstatic command, which can be used to debug issues with your static files. Later, you'll get an overview of how to write code for storing static files on a remote service. Finally, you'll look at caching web assets and how Django can help with cache invalidation.