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

Summary

In this chapter, we showed how to use Django's staticfiles app to find and serve static files. We used the built-in static view to serve these files with the Django dev server in DEBUG mode. We showed different places to store static files, using a directory that is global to the project or a specific directory for the application; global resources should be stored in the former while application-specific resources should be stored in the latter. We showed the importance of namespacing static file directories to prevent conflicts. After serving the assets, we used the static tag to include them in our template. We then demonstrated how the collectstatic command copies all the assets into the STATIC_ROOT directory, for production deployment. We showed how to use the findstatic command to debug the loading of static files. To invalidate caches automatically, we looked at using ManifestFilesStorage to add a hash of the file's content to the static file URL. Finally,...