Project Less Django – dutils.pld

Getting started with django is rather tedious. One has to learn and create a project, and an application at the minimum. One also has to understand settings, add the newly created app to INSTALLED_APPS and so forth.

dutils.pld aims to avoid all this.

Starting Server

To start using dutils.pld invoke it using the command line:

$ python -m dutils.pld runserver
Validating models...
0 errors found

Django version 1.2.1, using settings None
Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

This will start a development server.

Note that you can do it from any directory. Once it is running we can start writing python modules that will be served by django.

Handler Modules

A minimalistic hello world module would be, hello.py:

def handle(request):
    return "hello world"

Save this file, and visit http://127.0.0.0:8000/hello/. Thanks to django’s runserver’s auto reload feature, any changed made in hello.py will be reflected without requiring a restart by developer.

Each handler module must define a method named handle. This method will take one parameter, request. Request is an instance of HttpRequest class.

handle must return either a string or a subclass of HttpResponse object.

An example of a handle that redirects user to a different page:

from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect

def handle(request):
    return HttpResponseRedirect("/")

Templates Are Configures

dutils.pld configures django to serve templates from a folder named templates in the current directory.

This means handlers can use django’s template system for serving, for example:

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from datetime import datetime

def handle(request):
    current_time = datetime.now()
    return render_to_response(
        "index.html", {"current_time": current_time}
    )

To use the template, create a folder named templates in current folder, and store index.html in it:

<h1>Current time is {{ current_time }}</h1>

Serving Static Media

To help developers to quickly start getting their hands dirty with django, dutils.pld configures django to serve files stored in a folder named static.

To use this feature, create a folder named static in your current directory, store a file style.css in it. That file will be available at http://127.0.0.1:8000/static/style.css.

Files can be organized into folders inside static folder, so a file named static/js/jquery.js will be server on http://127.0.0.1:8000/static/js/jquery.js for example.

Settings

While dutils.pld takes care of setting up all settings required by django, it may be so that more settings are still required. To set any settings, create a file settings.py in the current folder, and it will overwrite settings used by dutils.pld.

Example settings.py:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = ["templates2"]
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    "django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth",
    "django.core.context_processors.debug",
    "django.core.context_processors.i18n",
    "django.core.context_processors.media",
    "django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages"
)