Build a Simple Poll App with Django: Step‑by‑Step Guide

The author translates an English Django tutorial to help readers overcome language barriers.

Let’s learn by example. Throughout this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the creation of a basic poll application.

The tutorial covers two parts: a public site for viewing and voting on polls, and an admin site for managing polls.

Assume Django is installed; you can verify the installation and version with the following command:

If Django is not installed, install it via pip install Django . If the version does not match, update Django or adjust code for Python 2.7 as noted.

Creating a project

Run django-admin startproject mysite to generate the project structure.

Do not name the project after built‑in components such as django or test.

Place your code outside the web server’s document root (e.g., /home/mycode) for security.

The development server

Start the server with python manage.py runserver. It will be available at http://127.0.0.1:8000/ .

Ignore initial migration warnings; the server is for development only.

Change the port with python manage.py runserver 8080 or bind to all IPs with python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000 .

Creating the Polls app

Create the app with python manage.py startapp polls. The resulting polls directory contains the basic structure for the app.

Write your first view

In polls/views.py add a simple view that returns the text “Hello, world. You’re at the polls index.”

Create polls/urls.py with a URL pattern for the view and include it in mysite/urls.py using include().

The include() function allows modular URL configurations, making it easy to plug‑and‑play URLs across different apps.

The url() function takes four arguments: regex (the pattern to match), view (the callable to invoke), optional kwargs , and optional name for reverse URL resolution.

When you’re comfortable with the basic request‑response flow, proceed to part 2 of the tutorial to work with the database.