Welcome to Getting Started with Django. Before we start, I want to go over the basic idea of the series and what I hope to give you through it.
First, this series is meant to take you from novice to competent. What do I mean by novice? You’ve done the Django tutorial, you understand the basics of Python, but you have little-to-no idea about how to go forward from here without making a ton of mistakes.
Secondly, this series is meant to show you current best practices. Libraries that are go-to solutions for myself and many other Django developers out there.
And, lastly, this series is meant to be a solid platform for you to build your own sites and applications in a testable, re-usable, and distributable manner. I don’t want you just assembling building blocks, but actively creating.
So, let’s get started. The first step is to go to gettingstartedwithdjango.com, which you’re probably already at.
Welcome to episode 2 of Getting Started with Django. In the first episode, we created the Microblog project and got it running on Heroku, but it didn't really do anything. Now let's take it further and get something we can actually use.
The first thing you'll want to do is go back to the directory where you previously did vagrant up and run that command again. Whenever you're finished working, you'll want to run vagrant halt or vagrant suspend so that vagrant will power down the VM and the VM will be waiting for you to come back. If you run vagrant destroy, it'll delete the VM and wipe out all of the work you've done installing packages and the like. Your code will still be safe, of course, because it's on your system, not the VM.
Source the environment again (source ~/blog-venv/bin/activate), and go back to the /vagrant/projects/microblog/ directory.
Testing is a very important part of being a developer and one that we definitely shouldn't skip. I don't tend to do test-driven development, where you would write the tests first, but I do try and make sure to write tests before anything goes live.
In this episode, we start our Lending project (again) and set up a custom user class and the required admin forms to make it all work!