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Python Django Explained In 8 Minutes

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Dennis Ivy

Creator on the Django channel

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462K viewsOct 29, 20218:11 runtime

Master the fundamentals of the Python Django framework with this comprehensive guide to its core concepts. Learn how to structure projects using Django apps, handle requests with views, and map them with URL routing. This overview covers essential topics including models and the…

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Core Django Concepts for Beginners

This document summarizes the essential concepts every developer should master when learning the Python Django framework.

Project Structure & Request Cycle

Apps: A Django project is composed of individual apps. Each app encapsulates a distinct piece of functionality (e.g., a users app, a posts app). Apps are registered in the main settings.py file.
Views: Views are Python functions or classes that process an HTTP request and return an HTTP response. They contain the business logic of your application.
URL Routing: The urls.py file maps URL paths to specific views. When a user visits a URL, Django uses these patterns to determine which view to execute.
Templates: Django's templating engine allows you to generate dynamic HTML. You can embed variables ({{ my_variable }}) and use tags ({% for item in items %}), which are processed by the view before being sent to the browser.

Tip
For beginners, it's recommended to start with function-based views as they are more explicit and easier to understand than class-based views.

Database and Data Management

Models: Models are Python classes that define the structure of your database tables. Each attribute in a model class maps to a database field (e.g., CharField, IntegerField). Django uses models to interact with the database via its ORM.
ORM (Object-Relational Mapper): The ORM allows you to query your database using Python code instead of writing raw SQL. Common methods include .all(), .filter(), .get(), and .save().
CRUD Operations: Standing for Create, Read, Update, and Delete, these are the fundamental operations for any data-driven application. You should know how to implement them manually, with ModelForms, or with Class-Based Views.
Admin Panel: Django automatically generates a powerful admin interface from your models, providing a quick way to perform CRUD operations on your data.

Essential Application Features

Static & Media Files: Static files (.css, .js, images) are part of your application's design, while media files are user-uploaded content. You must learn to configure Django to serve both correctly.
Authentication: Django provides a robust, built-in system for handling user registration, login, logout, and password resets. Password resets require configuring an email backend.
Signals: Signals are a powerful way to decouple applications and perform actions when specific events occur. A common use case is sending a welcome email when a new user registers (post_save signal on the User model).

Production & Advanced Topics

Databases: While Django defaults to SQLite for development, you must learn to configure it for production-grade databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Django REST Framework (DRF): In modern web development, Django is often used to build a backend API for a frontend framework (like React or Vue). DRF is the industry standard for building powerful and flexible APIs with Django.
Deployment: A crucial final step is knowing how to deploy your application to a hosting platform like Heroku or AWS, which includes configuring the server, database, and static file hosting.

Important
Learning Django REST Framework is highly recommended, as most professional Django roles will expect this skill.

Key Management Commands

A few of the most frequently used commands:

python manage.py startproject <project_name>: Creates a new Django project.
python manage.py startapp <app_name>: Creates a new app within a project.
python manage.py makemigrations: Creates new migration files based on changes to your models.
python manage.py migrate: Applies the database migrations.
python manage.py createsuperuser: Creates an admin user for the Django admin panel.

Introduction to Django Concepts

When it comes to learning the Django framework, there can be a lot to learn. What I want to do here is highlight some of the key concepts that every beginner should aim to learn and master. Knowing and being able to apply these concepts will ensure you are capable of building out most of the functionality you see on websites today and can make you a potential candidate for a job.

As always, with learning these concepts comes practice and implementation. But before we start, I want to quickly mention my complete Django course that's linked in the video description. In this course, you will learn about all the concepts that I mentioned here and more while applying what you learned to build out a platform for developers to display their profile and share their work. Okay, let's start with the first concept that every Django developer should know.

Structuring Projects with Django Apps

At the heart of every Django website are apps. Apps are small pieces of our project that make up an entire website. We create apps to represent different parts of a website, and how you structure your apps is completely up to you. Apps typically contain some kind of database models, URLs, views, and other information about a particular part of our website.

Think about this structure for a minute and imagine we were building facebook.com with Django. You can have one app that represents all the information and logic about your users. Another app that contains all your database tables, logic for posts, and things related like likes and comments for those posts—all inside of one app. When it comes to Facebook groups, that would be best to put that into its own app so all that logic is separate from other parts of our website.

All these apps would sit inside of a main project folder, and you would simply let Django know about these apps by registering them inside of your application settings file.

Handling Requests with Views

Views are simply functions that are in charge of processing a user's request when they visit a certain URL or endpoint on our website. When a user goes to our website, some view associated with that URL is responsible for some logic in the back end and returning some form of response with data, and this is typically some kind of HTML template or JSON data.

Views can also be represented as classes, and these are called class-based views. The major difference between function-based views and class-based views is how they extend logic. For anybody just starting to learn Django, I would highly recommend you first start by learning function-based views because they are easier to understand and most of the documentation is written using function-based views. However, I think it's necessary to have a good understanding of class-based views and how to effectively use them.

URL Routing and Patterns

To handle URL routing in a Django application, we create URL patterns in a list and simply attach different paths to those views. This is how Django knows which view to fire off when a user visits a URL on our website. In this example, we would simply use the path function, set a URL route, and assign an associated view.

Django's Templating Language

Nowadays, with the popularity of building APIs and front-end frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue, you may end up not even needing traditional templates in your application. With that being said, there's still a good chance you may use them, so a solid understanding of the Django templating language is still important.

Models and the ORM

Models are simply class-based representations of our database tables and are at the core of how we design our database. With models, we simply create a class that represents a table, and the attributes in this class represent each column inside of that database table. Knowing how to create relationships between these tables, such as one-to-many and many-to-many, is also a must.

Along with knowing how to design your database, you also need to know how to work with this database. Simple methods like get, all, and filter are how we retrieve items from the database using Django's built-in ORM.

The Built-in Admin Panel

Django provides us with a quick start interface to work with our data. While personally I like to build out my own interface in any application I make, Django also gives us this admin panel to view, create, and update any data in our database. The admin panel is a great tool to start with and is also highly customizable.

Performing CRUD Operations

While building most any application, you probably will have to perform CRUD operations at some point. This stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete. While you do have the admin panel that allows you to do a lot of this, you should know how to build all of this functionality out on your own. We can perform tasks like this by writing all of our own code from scratch, using methods like the save and delete method, or we could use Django model forms and or class-based views that handle a lot of this functionality for us.

In either case, you should know how to perform all of these tasks in different ways.

Managing Static and Media Files

Static files are essential to every website as they add in a visual layer to our application, like images, CSS, and JavaScript, along with any other static assets. Knowing how to configure your static assets along with being able to handle user-uploaded content such as profile pictures or any other content that the user may upload is one of the core essentials of many applications.

User Authentication

Lucky for us, Django makes authentication very simple with all of its built-in methods and forms. With this, every beginner should be capable of handling user registration, login, logout, and password reset functionality. With password reset, there is however an added layer because you will need to understand how to configure emails in order to send out an email when a user requests a new password.

Essential Management Commands

Django has a whole list of built-in commands for us to use, so I'll keep it simple by narrowing it down to five commands that you'll probably use right away in any application. The startproject command creates the boilerplate Django files. The startapp command gives us the boilerplate for an app and all the files associated. makemigrations preps our database for migrations, and migrate executes these migrations and actually updates the database. The createsuperuser command allows us to create a user in our database with admin-level permissions.

Using Django Signals

Signals are extremely powerful for when we need to listen for events that occur inside of our application. You'll need to learn how to create senders and receivers to listen for events and fire off actions whenever these events occur. One way I like to use signals is to add in event listeners for anytime a new user registers on my website. When this happens, I fire off an action that simply sends out a welcome email to that user with any extra information they might need.

Production Databases

While Django does provide us with an SQLite database to start building our project, most applications you'll work with will need some form of production-level ready database like MySQL or PostgreSQL. You'll need to know how to make this connection inside of your settings file and also how to work with that specific database.

Building APIs with Django REST Framework

As I mentioned before when I was talking about templates, many developers will skip building templates in Django altogether in their application and just end up building out some kind of API with Django on the back end and use a front-end framework like React or Angular on the front end. This is a viable option, and I've actually done this in multiple applications myself. With that being said, learning how to use the Django REST Framework with Django in this process has really become a standard. You may be able to build out your applications without it, but there's a solid chance at some point you'll need it, and an even better chance that any job you apply to will expect you to know how to work with and use the Django REST Framework.

Deploying Your Application

Okay, so on this part, I'm going to go a little bit easier on beginners because it does include other technologies, but I do think every Django beginner should be capable of deploying their application. This means being familiar with platforms such as Heroku, AWS, or any other platform that allows you to deploy your application and host your database and static assets.

Conclusion

It's essential to not only know how to build your application on a local machine but also how to deploy it and make sure it's production ready. Alright, so those are my 15 concepts that I think every Django developer should master. Don't forget to subscribe if you enjoyed this video and make sure to check out the course linked in the video description.