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development journal

I will use this journal to record my steps, issues, and solutions as they arise.

getting started

I am envisioning that I can eventually have a homepage that includes links, weather, maybe an inbox for recent emails and/or chat messages, and calendar reminders. I am not sure if this means I should make separate apps for these functions (they will have separate models and serve separate functions) or just include them all in a single app (the model could contain different classes). I do think that if I make separate apps, I Will need one app to rule them all and import those separate apps into a single view. Anyway, for now I will get started just making links, similar to my existing ReactJS homepage.

initial steps

  1. enter virtual environment for django development

  2. django-admin startproject homepyge

  3. test:

    python manage.py runserver

  4. add .pyc to gitignore and make first commit/sync to GH

  5. add the "links" app:

    python manage.py startapp links

settings.py

I accidentally exposed my SECRET_KEY so I erased it and am using an environment variable instead. Note that I had to set HOMEPYGE_SECRET in the OS but then also export it (I had never grasped that step before) so that it's an environment variable and not just a shell variable.

I also switched around some settings so that it will honor the environment variable of HOMEPYGE_DEBUG, if present, to set DEBUG. It defaults to False if not set, so that I don't accidentally publish my debug info in production.

Links app and models

I went ahead and ran python startapp links (which I forgot to do earlier) to initialize my "Links" app. I registered it with my project in 'settings' and created a model for Links, which just has a title, description, and URL. I'll probably add other fields later, like at least an image to use for each.

I then ran python manage.py makemigrations links followed by python manage.py migrate to actually run the SQL to update my tables.

URLs

Now I want to be able to reach an actual "links" page (I'll deal with the fact that I want this to all be one page later). I used include to put in the pattern-matcher and send users to links.url, but that doesn't exist yet so I'll create it.

Then:

  • add the URL pattern path('', views.links, name="links") to polls.urls.py
  • create /template/links folder in links/
  • create links.html file and plop it in that folder
  • then in views.py (which is really where we define what I would think of as endpoints rather than "views", but whatever), just simply return that links.html file when that function/endpoint is reached.

Now, going to mysite/links takes me to that HTML page which renders properly in the browser!

admin panel

Now for the admin panel. I just need to add a couple lines to links/admin.py to tell Django that the Links should be available from the admin panel.

I also need to create admin credentials. To do this, I use the terminal and just enter python manage.py createsuperuser. That's really it. Now I can just add Links directly through that admin terminal. Awesome!

rendering some links

Now to get those links to render on my page. I think I'll need to adjust my views (to make the Link data accessible to the page) and then for now I'll just do a super-simple loop and show them all as list items.

Here are the steps:

  • in views.py of the "links" app, I imported a shortcut function called get_list_or_404 which I (apparently correctly) guessed would return the full list of my links
  • use that function to assign all my links to a variable (line 7)
  • provide that list as context to the template by adding it as a dictionary as the final argument to render()
  • then, I can just access that list from within the template, looping over it to create the links i need.

thoughts on getting started

So, I feel like I'm in a good place for a first session. I got my project and app created, set up my model, and I can now add Links using the admin panel and view them in a simple, unformatted list of links by visiting localhost:8000/links. Next obvious step is to add some more formatting and sort the links into lists based on their category (which will also require a db update/migration).

Another big thing I hadn't properly thought through was building and deployment. Deployment is going to be trickier than it was with a Node.js app, and just using the default settings results in an error (I also had to set an environment variable on Netlify called PYTHON_VERSION to get it to not use Python 2.7). It sounds like Heroku might offer a more Django-friendly deployment option but it's not authorizing me into my GH account at the moment, so that will be something to try next time.

deployment attempt

Let's give this a whirl!

Still getting a "failed to compile Python app" error. Now I'm trying a couple more changes from this tutorial.

Successfully deployed! I am really excited about this. Thanks to @maansi1702 for GeeksForGeeks and AskPython for the tutorials that helped me overcome this hurdle. One important thing to note is that my CSS is not loading at all, so even the admin panel is just unformatted links. That will be the next thing to fix and then I can focus on UI and on organizing and categorizing the links!

style attempt #1

took a quick look at styles today. I followed the same steps I took in the django tuturial but things are not working. I am getting this error:

Refused to apply style from 'http://127.0.0.1:8000/static/links/style.css' because its MIME type ('text/html') is not a supported stylesheet MIME type, and strict MIME checking is enabled.

style attempt #2

I found this little gem in the Django docs:

In addition to these configuration steps, you’ll also need to actually serve the static files. During development, if you use django.contrib.staticfiles, this will be done automatically by runserver when DEBUG is set to True (see django.contrib.staticfiles.views.serve()). This method is grossly inefficient and probably insecure, so it is unsuitable for production.

So good of them to mention this in the tutorial! I was curious how we were getting around having a bundler, so this makes sense.

So as of now, I have verified that the current code DOES apply styling to the links page as long as DEBUG is set to true. I'll need to keep learning about how to handle static files in production, so that's next.

Oh, just an extra note: setting debug to TRUE and enabling static file collection also suddenly adds formatting to the admin panel. It's good to know that will take care of itself once I figure out how to get static files up and running on the deployed project.