My personal notes and thoughts on Django Web Development

May 11, 2016

Customizing the Django Admin site

Let’s start by saying that Django’s admin site is spectacular. It can literally save you months of work, but having said that, one thing that one needs to understand is that Django’s admin site is only ok as an…

Adding User Login to your django site

This is the first part of a series on customizing your django site and understanding the authentication middleware of Django.

In this first example we are going to explain how to add login capabilities to your already existing web app…

Hernán Tylim

May 3, 2016

How to do a basic CRUD REST API with an ORM-Less Django

The other day had a client that needed to build a very basic web service and the only requirement that I had was that this would needed to be done on top of an existing database and table.

django-cms: this is not a review

I am trying different blog and CMS solutions that are Django native. The first one that I came into was django-cms. The following is NOT a review. I only played with it a little, this is more like a ‘done the tutorial’ and ‘ first impressions’ type of post.

The Multiple Settings Files Pattern

I read this first in Two Scoops of Django a while back.

When we start working with Django we learn fast that we’ll need to use some settings values to run the app in development mode, and some other setting values for when we deploy the app…

Hernán Tylim

Apr 18, 2016

What to do with passwords and secrets?

What should we do with all the secret stuff that we have in our code?

Meaning, Django’s SECRET_KEY setting, various user and password credentials (EMAIL, DATABASE, …), API KEYs to 3rd party REST API, so on…

Hernán Tylim

Apr 17, 2016

httpie is yummy

If you are developing REST APIs you need a client to test them.

If you are on Linux you use curl.

If you are on Windows, you can look for a Chrome or Firefox plugin (I used poster a while ago) but I recommend you to use httpie

Starting with django-rest-framework

Django-Rest-Framework doc here.

Let’s say that you want to create a REST API and you want to use rest_framework, here is what you need to know to start using it right away (BTW you can also read their official tutorial, here).

Hernán Tylim

Apr 16, 2016

Current DateTime for default value in a Model? Use callables

So. Let’s say that you have:

# app/models.py
from django.db import models
from datetime import datetime

class Book(models.Model):
  name = models.CharField(max_length=128)…

Hernán Tylim

Apr 15, 2016

Django’s Hooks and Signals

Django doc here.

Sometimes you want to do something in your webapp as a response to an event that occurred elsewhere.

For instance. You might want that each time a model is saved to execute an action or update a different model.