I'm new to django and plan on building a large django project.
I'm starting to implement cookicutter django after reading through "2 Scoops of Django" but still have some questions on structuring a project.
I've setup my project, we'll call it 'business_proj'. In business_proj I started an app called 'accounting' this might have an accounting dashboard for users in the accounting security group. Now, what if I want to have apps that belong to accounting, such as 'invoices' and 'purchase_orders'? Should I create those apps inside my accounting app? Or should I create all my apps in the main project root? The way I've started doing it is creating child apps inside of their parent apps but some parent apps are so big that even this gets messy. Is there a better way to do this? Thanks
If you have gone through Two Scoops of Django then you should probably check out Django Cookiecutter which has been created by the authors of this book.
Django Cookiecutter is an excellent boilerplate for starting a Django application both for personal use and for production.
They also have excellent documentation which will help you with the best practices for Python and Django coding.
Check out: Django Cookiecutter Git Link
I suppose it depends on the tastes of each developer. I split each funtionality in a separate app for example. I have never used child apps. Excepts when I work with Django Rest Framework. With Django Rest Framework I create a child app of each up for REST funtionality.
Related
I'm about to develop a web site that works closely with database attributes.
It needs to fetch required data from the db based on search criteria and to display them as table.
I was studying django and feel that I'm ready to start the development process.
Now, I need to decide rather I choose to go with Pinax or just pure Django with apps that suit my needs.
i do want some social functionality like sending notifications to friends and maybe later a forum on site.
What do you think? should i go with pure Django or should i give Pinax a try?
Pinax wont run without django so you need to use django either way. If you want to create sitw with social networking feature pinax is a good option. If you just need user management, django has it built in.
I am looking for a guide to migrate Django project to Google App Engine and use Google's datastore. The most of the guides I found were linked to Django-Appengine using Django-nonrel (but I want to use GAE's native support).
Going through GAE getting started guide, it says:
Google App Engine supports any framework written in pure Python that speaks CGI (and any WSGI-compliant framework using a CGI adaptor), including Django, CherryPy, Pylons, web.py, and web2py. You can bundle a framework of your choosing with your application code by copying its code into your application directory.
I understand that I won't be able to use some features of Django in that case (majorly the admin feature) and would also need to restructure the models.
From other reading, I also found that latest SDK of GAE now includes Django 1.3 on Python 2.5.
I tried to put all files from my Django application to a GAE project, but couldn't get it all to work together.
Please provide some basic guide using which I may migrate my Django project to Google App Engine's code.
Thanks.
For an existing Django app, using django-nonrel is the simplest approach; it is very popular so you should be able to find help with specific errors you get quickly.
Another approach is written up in this article: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/pure_django.html -- it goes the other way, taking an App Engine app that uses Django for dispatch, templates, and forms, but not for models, and describes how to make it run in a native Django environment. Maybe you can glean some useful hints for your situation from it.
I've used django-nonrel, which behaves pretty much like django, except that operations with JOINs will return errors. I've basically worked around this by avoiding ManyToMany fields, and essentially building that functionality manually with an intermediate table.
So far I've ran into two problems with Django-nonrel:
1. No access to ancestor queries, which can be run in a transaction. There's a pending pull request for this feature though.
2. You can't specify fields that are not indexed. This could significantly increase your write costs. I have an idea to fix this, but I haven't done so yet.
(Edit: You CAN specify fields that are not indexed, and I've verified this works well).
2 (new). Google is pushing a new database backend called ndb that does automatic caching and batching, which will not be available with django-nonrel.
If you decide not to use django-nonrel, the main differences are that Django models do not run under App Engine. You'll have to rewrite your models to inherit from App Engine's db.Model. Your forms that use Django's ModelForm will need to inherit from google.appengine.ext.db.djangoforms instead. Once you're on App Engine, you'd have to port back Django if you ever take your app somewher else.
If you already have a Django application you might want to check this out. You won't work with App Engine's datastore but Google Cloud SQL might fit your needs.
I have an application built with Django. Part of it relies on data that I aggregate from other websites. Wondering how I should approach building the scraper/aggregator.
The advantages I see of building it as a Django app is
the ability to use Django's models & database API
the ability to use Django's other methods
On the other hand I think the disadvantage would be scalability in the long run.
Should I build the scraper/aggregator as an app in my Django project or as a separate script that runs on its own?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Neither of your points require it to run within Django. And since it will not be dependent on the web/HTTP interface, having it be a separate module is the only option that makes sense.
I just have published a Django app django-dynamic-scraper on GitHub, which is build on top of the scraping framework Scrapy and where you can build Scrapy scrapers in the Django admin and use Django model classes to store your scraped data, maybe this is of some use for people with similar problems.
If it's a django app, it will only run when someone loads the page. That could slow the loading.
Making another script could be a nicer idea but could produce inaccurate data.
I think it actually depends on the context.
I'm working with a Satchmo store installation that should reside within an existing django project. This django project has its own settings.py, local_settings.py, templates as well as templates for some of the various apps that have been installed.
Can you please suggest the steps to integrate satchmo store inside an existing django project with satchmo store using the django projects settings.py, local_settings.py, templates and database?
I recently had to do something similar. But it depends on what you want to actually do. I presume the most valuable part of Satchmo is the payment processing. It was for us. A cart with products and inventory is actually pretty simple to pull off with django. Satchmo was pulled apart into separate apps, and the payment processing was made into django-bursar (https://bitbucket.org/bkroeze/django-bursar) (I along with others have forked it to add some functionality).
Taking that app and connecting to gateways for payment processing is fairly straightforward.
I wanted to check the status of running Django on the Google App Engine currently and what the benefits of running django on GAE over simply using Webapp.
Django main killer feature, IMHO, is the reuseable apps and middleware. Unfortunately, most current Django apps use models or model forms (django-tags, django-reviews, django-profiles, Pinax apps).
So what are the remaining features or benefits that django has that can still run in Google App Engine (other than what's disabled: the popular django apps, session and authentication middleware, users and admin, models, etc).
Also, is there a list of the Django apps that work in App Engine as well?
app-engine-patch currently has the most of django functional, including sessions, contrib.auth, sites, and some other standard django apps. However, its main drawback (my opinion) is that it uses a zip file of a modified version of django to achieve this functionality and the current maintainers don't seem to have kept pace with current django releases. Currently it seems to be the consensus of the past and present maintainers that this approach is too cumbersome to maintain and therefore no one is currently maintaining it.
google-app-engine-django, uses a monkey patch approach of the latest django version included in the production GAE runtime, so as long as google continues to track django releases you'll be kept up to date regarding django. However, it currently has not fully ported contrib.auth, so you can only authenticate with google accounts - which can be a big drawback depending on whether you want contrib.auth User models to work as you know them on sql backends. There is also no django admin support in the helper as there is in app-engine-patch. A fork of django-app-engine-django exists which adds in some of the contrib apps, such as flatpages, sites, and sitemaps. Also note, it only works on django versions up to 1.1, until issue #3230 Django 1.2 is added to use_library, unless you upload django as a zip file.
On the horizon, the original developer of app-engine-patch has been working on the django-nonrel branch, but this may be pretty far away from being included in a django release. This django developers thread has a lot of information about these efforts.
Separately, there is a google summer of code project working on integrating some aspects of nonrel db's.
app-engine-patch gets most of those things working inside AppEngine - so you can (mostly) use straight Modelforms, use the Django users and admin, etc.
I've only used it for fairly simple projects (being quite new to django), but they claim that most Django apps will work with (at most) minor modifications on appengine. For instance, app-engine-patch uses the AppEngine Model classes rather than the Django classes; and there are some of the basic views that are too inefficient to run on Appengine.
added: google-app-engine-django is similar; but provides a BaseModel that appears identical to Django's BaseModel. My understand is that google-app-engine-django was released by Google, then forked to create app-engine-patch. The maintainers of app-engine-patch seem to have some different goals from the creators of google-app-engine-django, so you may find that one of the two suits your needs better than the other.
Google have provided some articles on running Django apps on appengine; the most recent is actually a guest post from the authors of app-engine-patch.
I've had the best success by simply picking and choosing the Django features that I need and patching them into webapp myself. In my latest project I actually just cut out the webapp stuff entirely. I still import and call several webapp utility functions, but it is mostly a hand rolled application built from the good parts of GAE and Django.
You might be interested to check out web2py, another Python framework that supposedly has less friction between GAE and a "normal" web server.
It is now quite easy to use full Django on GAE:
https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/django-nonrel#ps
The Django version provided with App Engine has been updated to 1.2.5 with the latest SDK release (1.4.2, changelog). This version is available through the use_library() declaration, so you no longer need to mess around with monkey patching to the same extent.
The GoogleAppEngine (GAE) Python 2.7 runtime provides several third-party libraries that your application can use, in addition to the Python standard library, GAE tools, and GAE Python runtime environment. One of them is Django. The below is copied from the GAE docs page on third-party libraries:
To use Django in Python 2.7, specify the WSGI application and Django library in app.yaml:
...
handlers:
- url: /.*
script: main.app # a WSGI application in the main module's global scope
libraries:
- name: django
version: "1.2"