django-boilerplate

Are you tired of going through the same process whenever you want to start a new project in Django? To set up a production standard Django project can be overwhelming at times.

Here, I present to you this boilerplate that set up an enterprise standard Django project using latest version of Django

Note

make dev-install will install Django~=5.0, which ensures security update for Django version 5.

Set Up

• Clone the repo git clone https://github.com/Eyongkevin/django-boilerplate.git
• Change the project name to your own project name: mv django-boilerplate/ <your-project-name>
• Add an .env file with the following configurations

SECRET_KEY=
DB_NAME=
DB_USER=postgres
DB_PWD=postgres
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=5432

Using sqlite3

• If you want to use sqlite3 as your database, then just the SECRET_KEY is required.
• The boilerplate is configured to use postgresql by default. So, to switch to sqlite3, move to the development settings at config/settings/dev.py and adjust the database for sqlite3 by uncommenting for sqlite3 and commenting for postgresql.

Generate your SECRET_KEY

• We can generate this value in many ways, to do it with Python, we can use the secrets library. Run the following in your python shell

import secrets
secrets.token_urlsafe(50) # 'TwNkN-nrAtdYMt6rFVFGQ0znc1JPlAn64bLf5EgkeYX_GBZiVJfNR3EYyUaN91_P7PU'

• Get the generated token and set SECRET_KEY

SECRET_KEY=django-insecure-TwNkN-nrAtdYMt6rFVFGQ0znc1JPlAn64bLf5EgkeYX_GBZiVJfNR3EYyUaN91_P7PU

Using postgresql

• In addition to setting up the SECRET_KEY above, we need to provide the configuration for postgresql
• Here, I am using the user postgres with password postgres. But you can always create a new role with a unique password

psql -U postgres

CREATE ROLE <role-name> WITH PASSWORD '<password>'

ALTER ROLE <role-name> CREATEDB;
ALTER ROLE <role-name> LOGIN;

Create database

\c postgres <role-name>

CREATE DATABASE <db-name>;

• After having created the user role, password and database, fill these values in the .env.

Create new repo

If you clone the boilerplate, the git remote will reference this boilerplate. So, to reference your own repo, you can do a few things;

• Create a new repo on github, don't add anything like README.
• Update the remote of this boilerplate to reference the new repo you just created.

git remote set-url origin <your-repo-url>.git

• Set the main branch: git branch -M main
• Push to origin: git push -u origin main

Boilerplate Structure

Settings

In the config/ folder, we have another folder; settings/ that contains all the settings based on the environment you are running at. This boilerplate has two; base.py and dev.py. If you are developing locally, you will be using the dev.py. If you want to go to production, then you can create a setting for production. For example prod.py

Requirements

Just like settings, we have a folder requirements/ that contains requirement files based on the environment you are running. This boilerplate has two; base.txt and dev.txt. If you are developing locally, you will be using dev.txt. If you want to go to production, then you can create a requirement for production. For example prod.py

Apps

All django applications should be created in the apps/ folder. This way, all apps are grouped and easy to find.

To create a new app, we do the following;

• cd to the apps/ directory and run the startapp management command

python3 ../manage.py startapp <app-name>

Or use this Makefile command from the working directory

make dev-startapp app=<app-name>

core app

In the apps/ directory, we have an app called core and this should contain common stuffs that will be used in all other apps. For example, this app has a model called CreatedModifiedAbstract in the abstract/ folder. This is an abstract model that defines two fields; created_at and modified_at.

Makefile

In order to run some very long commands using shortcuts, we have a Makefile that contains some commands for makemigrations, migration, installation, runserver and so on.

To run a command from the Makefile, we just run make <command-name> where <command-name> is a command in the Makefile