Why is the urls.py file not created automatically? - django

Almost every video which I saw about Django (for beginners), people who create applications using the startapp command and add their urls.py file manually in their application. My question is, if urls.py is so important for views and for our app why it's not creating automatically when we run startapp command!

Not every app directly serves the end user
URLs.py is only useful for routing users to pages which primarily have to do with that app. However, many apps may only do internal things. I have an app in one of my projects that handles badges and rewards, but there is no page which corresponds to any of that because it all shows exclusively as part of the profile pages (and the routing is handled within the profile app).
It just isn't always needed and that is why it is not always included.

Simply you don't have to serve each of your app to the end-users. You may have apps responsible for only your inner interactions. So it is not logical to put urls.py in each and every app.

It vary on how you use your routing.
django give project wide urls.py by default when you create the project using django-admin startproject command. so you can create all your project's urls on this file.
And not all app intended to server user directly using urls.
Whether i also prefer to create separate urls.py and api-urls.py routers for every app and include in main urls.py

Related

Where can I keep settings data for a reusable app

Django=3.1
I'd like to push some utilites of mine, template tags, filters etc. to a reusable app.
But this app will needs a huge amount of settings. Maybe 100-200 lines.
I'm thinking of placing a file called something "my_omnibus.py" next to project's settings.py
Is a good idea? If it is, could you tell me how to import that file into the reusable app if the name of the project may change.
If it is not, where can I keep the constants?
In your app's root directory, create a settings.py and dump all settings there. In that app, use relative imports e.g. from .settings import SETTING_A.
You shouldn't create settings next to project's settings.py module because those settings are only relevant to one app. You should only do such a thing only if those settings are going to be used by all apps (an example would be celery application configuration).

Moving from PHP/Laravel to Python/Django

I want some clarity. I want to learn more about django and use it as replacement for php/laravel. But the default structure and convention of django confuses me a bit.
My PHP/Laravel project has 3 parts:
- Administration
- Core (Web app for regular users)
- API Service (REST-API for mobile apps)
However all of controllers, models and views are contained in a single Laravel application. I separated Auth, Admin, Api controllers into their own folders/namespaces.
One thing that confuses me is the default Django structure 1 view 1 model file. How should i go about reworking this application in Django should each of my controllers be a separate app in my django project or should I have same approach as in Laravel. 3 Django apps in one project one for admin one for core and one for api ? Where should I keep my models than since in Laravel all models are used by all 3 parts ?
My current structure:
./
./controllers/
./auth/
LoginController.php
RegistrationController.php
...
./admin/
ReportsController.php
UserController.php (Admins overview of all users)
...
./api/
HealthController.php (API CRUD for Health resource)
ExerciseController.php
HomeController.php
UserController.php (Regular users profile page CRUD)
...
./models/
User.php
Health.php
Exercise.php
...
One thing to remember about Django is that an app in Laravel doens't necessary translate to an app in Django. In Django, there are projects, and each project can have any number of apps. For example, I have a "Backup Admin" project where I manage a lot of the day-to-day issues of managing a tape backup environment. I have an app for media (that has 3 models, one for regular media, one for cleaning media, and one for media that we want to exclude from tape ejections). I have an app that represents the backup images, and another for backup jobs (to check status codes). Each sub-piece of my project goes into another app.
If I wanted to do another Django project that had nothing to do with backups, I'd make that a completely separate project, which would have a separate directory structure from my backup project. It'd have it's own urls.py, settings.py, etc.
Regarding the models piece, I put all of one app's models in the same file. For example, in my media app, I have models.py, which contains all three models that I mentioned above. This is completely optional, but I do it just so while importing these models into other parts of the project, I don't have to remember what the file names are, instead I can just do this:
from media.models import CleaningMedia,Media,EjectExclusions
Otherwise I'd have to have 3 different import statements if they were in different files. It's completely possible, but based on your preferences.
Regarding the controller, Django lets you do it either way. You have a project-wide urls.py file that you can use to control all of the traffic, or you can have separate urls.py files in each app to control that app's traffic. I prefer a single file, but that's just me. Personally if you have a lot of controller entries, you should probably split them up into app-specific urls.py files, just to keep it clean, but again, either method would work. I think of maintainability (especially with respect to teammates having to support it) when I make these types of decisions.
The admin interface is built-in, so there's not really an app for that, but you can decide which models and which apps have entries on the admin interface quite easily. Each app has an admin.py file that controls this.
A side note, for a RESTful API, you also might want to consider Django Rest Framework. It's a great piece of software, and the documentation (and tutorials) are very helpful.
Edit:
The 1 view/1 model thing again is just preference. You can have as many files as you want. The only trade off is when you import them into other files, you have to specify the file you're importing it from. That's really all there is to it. I know people who have a views/ directory, and inside there, have separate files for each view, keeping each class/function separate. Totally a matter of preference.

Integrating Sphinx and Django in order to require users to log in to see the documentation

I am curious if it is possible to hide sphinx documentation inside a django app so that only people who log in can see it. It seems to me that since sphinx creates its own structure and that Django uses the urlconf to define which pages a user can see, that it wouldn't be possible to combine the two. Although there must be some combining since the Django website likely uses django and sphinx. I am wondering if anyone has any insight or if they can point me in the right direction.
Thank You in Advance!
Sphinx builds your docs into HTML files, so in most cases this docs should be served by your web server rather then Django. However Django is able to serve static files as well.
You can use the django.views.static.serve function to do this and wrap this function with login_required. E.g:
from django.views.static import serve
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'^docs/(?P<path>.*)', login_required(serve), {'document_root': '/path/to/sphinx/build/html'}, 'docs'),
)
However this configuration will be considered a bad practice in production environment as in this case Django will serve both html and css/js files from your sphinx theme.
The first improvement you can do here is to serve /path/to/sphinx/build/html/_static/ with apache/nginx or whatever you use.
The more proper way is to serve docs with apache/nginx and make it handle the auth itself. Unfortunately I made a quick Google search but did not find a way to use Django's User model to handle http_auth in apache or other. Alternatively you can use something like mod_sendfile or X-Accel modules - http://www.wellfireinteractive.com/blog/nginx-django-x-accel-redirects/ In a nutshell - Django app checks permission if user can view the file and add special header to response containing file path. Webserver will serve this file instead of original message from django

Where is recommended spot for storing admin customizations for Django contrib apps?

I want to add Django Sessions to my Django Admin, and I am following an SO post about this, but it is unclear where I store this code. Do I put it in an admin.py file? Under what directory?
In short, it doesn't matter. You can put the code into any of your apps' admin.py files. However, in situations like these I tend to use a generic app in my project, usually named something like utils, that exists for the sole purpose of housing code that doesn't belong to one specific app or could be used by multiple apps.
If you want to be more specific, you can create a sessions app in your project specifically devoted to this code and any other code related to session management for your project, or perhaps an existing app that is somewhat related. For example, I put customizations to the User admin in my accounts app that holds the UserProfile model.

Django views architecture

I'm new to django and had a question regarding organizing views. manage.py startapp creates a views.py in my app folder. But django-admin.py startproject <name> does not create a corresponding views.py file in the <project_name>/<project_name> folder.
I find it intuitive to have global views which do not correspond to a particular app. For example, a login page would and should be independent of any app that I create (its associated with the django auth app). So, would it make sense to create another views.py in the <project_name>/<project_name> folder where I can define such views?
(Just wanted to run it by experienced djangoers before I proceed.)
Thanks.
You can write your global views anywhere. it can be in any file name (I use, global_views.py)
I used to write a global to overrride/customize the default framework apps like custom authentication backend and custom sites.
Better to create a custom app and write all the global views.