Create a Django Project

The first step is to create a Django project. If you already have a project that you can play with, you can skip this step. To create a project, go to a place where you want to keep your code (like C:\projects or /home/me/projects) in a command prompt/terminal and run the following command:

django-admin.py startproject myproject

This will create a new directory in your current location called myproject (you can replace myproject with whatever you'd like so long as you're consistent). This new directory will contain a few files:

• __init__.py
• manage.py
• settings.py
• urls.py

If you get an error message when running the above command, you might not have Django installed properly. See Step-by-Step: Installing Django for details on installing Django.

Create An Application

Once you have a Django project setup, you should create a new application.

Note: If you're using Windows, you will probably need to omit the ./ on the ./manage.py commands. I will include them here for everyone else who's using Linux or a Mac.

cd myproject
./manage.py startapp specialapp

This will create a new directory in your myproject directory. This new directory will contain three files: __init__.py, models.py, and views.py. We are only concerned with the models.py file in this article.

Create Your Models

Models are usually a direct representation of what your database will be. Django makes creating these models extremely easy, and Python's syntax makes them quite readable. The Django framework asks for models to be defined in the models.py file that was created in the last step. Here's an example (for my buddy who prompted the creation of this article):

from django.db import models

class Component(models.Model):
    item_number = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    size = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    quantity = models.IntegerField(default=1)
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=8, decimal_places=2)

class Project(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    components = models.ManyToManyField(Component)
    instructions = models.TextField()

(for more information about models, see the Django Model API Reference)

I don't know about you, but that code seems pretty straightforward to me. I'll spare you all the details about what's going on (that can be a future article).