Writing first Django Application

This post is in continuation with our previous post “Starting webserver using your first simple Django project” , where we showed how we can start the webserver. Now, as we have the webserver running, lets see how we can start an application which will serve the custom built usecase over this webserver.

$ cd django_container

Your apps can live anywhere on your Python path. In this post, we’ll create our helloworld app in the same directory as your manage.py file so that it can be imported as its own top-level module, rather than a submodule of project.

$ python manage.py startapp my_helloworld_django_app

As we created the app, we can see it got created beside our project “my_django_project” in same directory “django_container”

$ ls
db.sqlite3  env  manage.py  my_django_project  my_helloworld_django_app

$ tree my_helloworld_django_app/
my_helloworld_django_app/
├── admin.py
├── apps.py
├── __init__.py
├── migrations
│ └── __init__.py
├── models.py
├── tests.py
└── views.py

As we start writing our first application, the first thing we need to do is to design how we want to show it to the end user, this design needs to be done in our applications views. ( i.e. my_helloworld_django_app/views.py in this example )

Write the app views

$ vim my_helloworld_django_app/views.py

from django.http import HttpResponse

def index(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello, world from Django First App!")

here, in our first django app, we intend to just show some string “Hello, world from Django First App” as http response when someone visits url in the server. i.e. it will be a http request.

$ vim my_helloworld_django_app/urls.py

from django.urls import path

from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.index, name='index'),
]

$ vim my_django_project/urls.py

from django.urls import include, path
urlpatterns = [
    path('helloworld/', include('my_helloworld_django_app.urls')),
]

path('helloworld/', include('my_helloworld_django_app.urls')) 

$ python manage.py runserver