Welcome to your first step into back-end engineering with Django! This lesson is your starting point in building powerful web applications. By the end of this unit, you'll have a fully functional basic Django project up and running. This foundation will be essential for everything we do moving forward.

In this unit, we'll focus on setting up a basic Django project. This involves creating a Django project and app, configuring essential settings, defining a simple view, and mapping URLs. Here's a brief overview of what you'll be doing:

Creating a Django Project and App: To build a Django project, we need to create a project and an app. A project is the entire web application, while an app is a web application component that performs a specific function. We'll create a project called myproject and an app called myapp. In the snippet below, we create a project and an app using the Django CLI:

This will create a project structure like this:

Let's break down the purpose of each file:

• myproject: The project directory that contains the settings, URLs, and WSGI configuration.
  • settings.py: Contains the project settings such as installed apps, middleware, and database configuration.
  • urls.py: Maps URLs to views in the project, so Django knows what to do when a request comes into a particular URL pattern.
  • wsgi.py: Contains the project's WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) configuration. This helps Django communicate with the web server, but we won't cover this file in this course path.
• myapp: The app directory that contains the app-specific files.
  • views.py: The views (functions) that handle HTTP requests and return responses.
  • models.py: Contains the database models for the app. We will cover this in future courses.

Mastering the setup of a Django project is crucial for any back-end developer. This initial step lays the groundwork for more advanced functionalities like handling data, serving static files, and user authentication. Understanding this process ensures you can confidently start new projects and create robust web applications that can scale and evolve.

Exciting, right? Let's get your hands dirty with the practice section and bring your first Django project to life!