Introduction to Django: Features, Project Structure, Configuration, and Routing

Django Overview

Django is a popular open‑source Python web framework that follows the MTV (Model‑Template‑View) pattern, a variant of MVC, providing integrated components such as ORM, template engine, caching, session management, and an automatic admin interface.

Key Features

It offers powerful database handling through Python class inheritance, a built‑in admin site, elegant URL routing with regular expressions, an extensible template system, caching support, and full internationalization.

Project Structure

The typical Django project contains files like urls.py (URL dispatcher), views.py (request handling), models.py (data layer), forms.py (form handling), templates/ (HTML templates), admin.py (admin site), and settings.py (configuration).

Basic Configuration

Creating a project uses django-admin startproject sitename. Common management commands include python manage.py runserver, startapp, makemigrations, migrate, createsuperuser, and dbshell. Database settings are defined in settings.py under the DATABASES dictionary, supporting SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. For MySQL with Python 3, install pymysql and call pymysql.install_as_MySQLdb(). Static files are served by adding STATIC_URL and STATICFILES_DIRS to settings.py.

Routing System

URL patterns are declared in urls.py using the url() function, which maps a regular‑expression pattern to a view callable. Example:

from django.conf.urls import url
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

Each pattern can capture parameters, optionally include a name, and is evaluated in order.