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Django 2 Web Development Cookbook

By : Jake Kronika, Aidas Bendoraitis

4 (6)

Django 2 Web Development Cookbook

4 (6)

By: Jake Kronika, Aidas Bendoraitis

Overview of this book

Django is a framework designed to balance rapid web development with high performance. It handles high levels of user traffic and interaction, integrates with a variety of databases, and collects and processes data in real time. This book follows a task-based approach to guide you through developing with the Django 2.1 framework, starting with setting up and configuring Docker containers and a virtual environment for your project. You'll learn how to write reusable pieces of code for your models and manage database changes. You'll work with forms and views to enter and list data, applying practical examples using templates and JavaScript together for the optimum user experience. This cookbook helps you to adjust the built-in Django administration to fit your needs and sharpen security and performance to make your web applications as robust, scalable, and dependable as possible. You'll also explore integration with Django CMS, the popular content management suite. In the final chapters, you'll learn programming and debugging tricks and discover how collecting data from different sources and providing it to others in various formats can be a breeze. By the end of the book, you'll learn how to test and deploy projects to a remote dedicated server and scale your application to meet user demands.

Preface

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Sections

Get in touch

Free Chapter

Getting Started with Django 2.1

Getting Started with Django 2.1

Introduction

Working with a virtual environment

Creating a virtual environment project file structure

Working with Docker

Creating a Docker project file structure

Handling project dependencies with pip

Including external dependencies in your project

Configuring settings for development, testing, staging, and production environments

Defining relative paths in the settings

Creating and including local settings

Setting up STATIC_URL dynamically for Subversion users

Setting up STATIC_URL dynamically for Git users

Setting UTF-8 as the default encoding for MySQL configuration

Setting the Subversion ignore property

Creating the Git ignore file

Deleting Python-compiled files

Respecting the import order in Python files

Creating app configuration

Defining overwritable app settings

Database Structure and Modeling

Database Structure and Modeling

Introduction

Using model mixins

Creating a model mixin with URL-related methods

Creating a model mixin to handle creation and modification dates

Creating a model mixin to take care of meta tags

Creating a model mixin to handle generic relations

Handling multilingual fields

Enabling schema microdata enhancements

Using migrations

Switching from South migrations to Django migrations

Changing a foreign key to the many-to-many field

Forms and Views

Forms and Views

Introduction

Passing HttpRequest to a form

Utilizing the save method of the form

Uploading images

Creating a form layout with custom templates

Creating a form layout with django-crispy-forms

Filtering object lists

Managing paginated lists

Composing class-based views

Generating PDF documents

Implementing a multilingual search with Haystack and Whoosh

Templates and JavaScript

Templates and JavaScript

Introduction

Exposing settings in JavaScript

Arranging the base.html template

Using HTML5 data attributes

Providing responsive images

Opening object details in a modal dialog

Implementing a continuous scroll

Implementing the Like widget

Uploading images via Ajax

Customizing Template Filters and Tags

Customizing Template Filters and Tags

Introduction

Following conventions for your own template filters and tags

Creating a template filter to show how much time has passed since a post was published

Creating a template filter to extract the first media object

Creating a template filter to humanize URLs

Creating a template tag to include a template if it exists

Creating a template tag to load a QuerySet in a template

Creating a template tag to parse content as a template

Creating a template tag to modify request query parameters

Model Administration

Model Administration

Introduction

Customizing columns on the change list page

Creating admin actions

Developing change list filters

Customizing default admin settings

Inserting a map into a change form

Security and Performance

Security and Performance

Introduction

Making forms secure from Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Implementing password validation

Downloading authorized files

Adding a dynamic watermark to images

Authenticating with Auth0

Caching the method return value

Using Memcached to cache Django views

Using Redis to cache Django views

Django CMS

Django CMS

Introduction

Creating templates for Django CMS

Structuring the page menu

Converting an app to a CMS app

Attaching your own navigation

Writing your own CMS plugin

Adding new fields to the CMS page

Hierarchical Structures

Hierarchical Structures

Introduction

Creating hierarchical categories with django-mptt

Creating a category administration interface with django-mptt-admin

Rendering categories in a template with django-mptt

Using a single selection field to choose a category in forms with django-mptt

Using a checkbox list to choose multiple categories in forms with django-mptt

Creating hierarchical categories with django-treebeard

Creating a basic category administration interface with django-treebeard

Importing and Exporting Data

Importing and Exporting Data

Introduction

Importing data from a local CSV file

Importing data from a local Excel file

Importing data from an external JSON file

Importing data from an external XML file

Creating filterable RSS feeds

Using Tastypie to create an API

Using Django REST framework to create an API

Bells and Whistles

Bells and Whistles

Introduction

Using the Django shell

Using database query expressions

Monkey patching the slugify() function for better internationalization support

Toggling the Debug Toolbar

Using ThreadLocalMiddleware

Using signals to notify administrators about new entries

Checking for missing settings

Testing and Deployment

Testing and Deployment

Introduction

Testing views with mock

Testing APIs created using the Django REST framework

Releasing a reusable Django app

Getting detailed error reporting via email

Deploying on Apache with mod_wsgi

Setting up cron jobs for regular tasks

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Setting UTF-8 as the default encoding for MySQL configuration

MySQL proclaims itself as the most popular open source database. In this recipe, we will tell you how to set UTF-8 as the default encoding for it. Note that if you don't set this encoding in the database configuration, you might get into a situation where LATIN1 is used by default with your UTF-8-encoded data. This will lead to database errors whenever symbols such as € are used. Also, this recipe will save you from the difficulties of converting the database data from LATIN1 to UTF-8, especially when you have some tables encoded in LATIN1 and others in UTF-8.

Getting ready

Make sure that the MySQL database management system and the MySQLdb Python module are installed and you are using the MySQL engine in your project's settings.

How to do it...

Open the /etc/mysql/my.cnf MySQL configuration file in your favorite editor and ensure that the following settings are set in the [client], [mysql], and [mysqld] sections, as follows:

# /etc/mysql/my.cnf
[client]
default-character-set = utf8

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8

[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
init-connect = ‘SET NAMES utf8’
character-set-server = utf8

If any of the sections don't exist, create them in the file. If the sections do already exist, add these settings to the existing configurations. Then, restart MySQL in your command-line tool, as follows:

$ /etc/init.d/mysql restart

How it works...

Now, whenever you create a new MySQL database, the databases and all of their tables will be set in UTF-8 encoding by default. Don't forget to set this on all computers on which your project is developed or published.

There's more...

For a Docker project, these settings can be added to the config/my.cnf file and saved to version control. This file will automatically be added as /etc/mysql/my.cnf within the container at build time. Furthermore, any developer that pulls down the code will automatically gain the configuration.

See also

The Creating a virtual environment project file structure recipe
The Creating a Docker project file structure recipe

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