Daniel Roy Greenfeld

Daniel Roy Greenfeld

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Django Requirements for a project

Today I'm starting a new project. I'm working as fast as I can and hope to launch on Friday. What are my package dependencies?

Django==1.4

Unlike my last quick project which was Flask, this effort really falls into Django's sweet spot. I need sessions, forms, templates, and models to do things in an ideal Django pattern.

psycopg2==2.4.5

I need transactions and hard-type validation in the database, which means PostgreSQL. If I didn't need transactions or the hard-type validation I would consider MongoDB instead.

django-debug-toolbar==0.9.4

Because not using this tool is insane.

django-extensions==0.8

Because amongst other things this library gives you, I never want to write my own TimeStampedModel ever again. :-)

South==0.7.5

Django gives you the freedom to migrate data in the way you want. The way I want to do it is via South.

django-registration==0.8.0

Normally django-social-auth is my go-to tool for registration, but in this case I need simple username/password registration. This is a very solid tool, but you do have to make your own templates or find someone's fork that has a copy of templates that match.

Update 2013/12/17: django-registration is no longer maintained and doesn't entirely work with modern Django's new user model system. Use django-allauth instead.

django-floppyforms==0.4.7

An excellent tool for making your forms HTML5-ish out of the box.

django-crispy-forms==1.1.3

The child of my own django-uni-forms, this will let me create forms using div-based controls super fast, and do layout customizations if I need them.

django-heroku-postgresify==0.2

This tool makes getting the PostGreSQL settings out of Heroku trivial.

django-heroku-memcacheify==0.1

This tool makes getting the memcache settings for Heroku trivial.

gunicorn==0.14.2

All the cool kids who play in devops swear by Gunicorn. I use it because Heroku seems to recommend it for Django deployments.


Installing the above packages

Never copy/paste these libraries directly into your projects. If you do that, you'll end up hating yourself later as your local instances become unmaintained forks of the real project. Also, unless you are really careful in your copy/pasting, you'll be in violation of various open source licenses. Odds are the FOSS police aren't going to find you, but I can assure you that when you bring in one of the authors of these packages to help you fix a problem he/she is going to be mighty annoyed at the lack of attribution.

Do it the right way: do proper Python dependency management.

Create a requirements.txt file and install them as proper dependencies. The file should contain the following text:

Django==1.4
South==0.7.5
django-crispy-forms==1.1.3
django-debug-toolbar==0.9.4
django-extensions==0.8
django-floppyforms==0.4.7
django-heroku-memcacheify==0.1
django-heroku-postgresify==0.2
django-registration==0.8.0
gunicorn==0.14.2
psycopg2==2.4.5

Once you have that, you install them thus in your virtualenv:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now that I have all this, it's time to code!


2010 Snowstorm!


Tags: python django setup
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