Writing your first Django app

Django is a powerful web framework for Python that makes it easy to build web applications quickly. In this tutorial, we will go through the process of creating a simple Django app and writing your first Django app.

Before we start, make sure you have Django installed. If you don't have it installed, you can use the following command to install it:

pip install django

Now let's start by creating a new Django project. Open up a terminal and navigate to the directory where you want to create the project. Then, run the following command:

django-admin startproject myproject

This will create a new directory called "myproject" with the basic Django files and directories inside.

Next, we need to create a Django app. A Django app is a self-contained package that contains all the code for a specific feature or functionality. To create a new app, navigate to the project directory and run the following command:

python manage.py startapp myapp

This will create a new directory called "myapp" with the basic Django app files and directories inside.

Now that we have a Django project and app set up, we can start writing our first Django app.

Let's create a view that displays a simple message. Open the file "myapp/views.py" and add the following code:

from django.http import HttpResponse

def hello(request):

    return HttpResponse("Hello, Django!")

This view function takes a request object as an argument and returns an HttpResponse object with the message "Hello, Django!".

Next, we need to create a URL pattern for this view. Open the file "myapp/urls.py" and add the following code:

from django.urls import path

from . import views

urlpatterns = [

    path('hello/', views.hello, name='hello'),

]

This code defines a URL pattern for the view we just created. The pattern is a string that specifies the URL for the view. In this case, the URL is "hello/".

Finally, we need to include the URL patterns of our app in the project's URLconf. Open the file "myproject/urls.py" and add the following code:

from django.contrib import admin

from django.urls import include, path

urlpatterns = [

    path('myapp/', include('myapp.urls')),

    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),

]

This code includes the URL patterns of our app in the project's URLconf.

Now, start the Django development server by running the following command:

python manage.py runserver

Open a web browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/myapp/hello/ to see the message "Hello, Django!".

Congratulations! You have just created your first Django app.

This tutorial only scratches the surface of what you can do with Django. To learn more, check out the official Django documentation at https://docs.djangoproject.com/.