DJANGO-KICKSTART

Version: 0.1.6 (28.03.2014)

This tool helps you to kickstart your new django project, by providing a better, more comprehensive setup that allows you to get going right away, and saves your precious time by automating tedious tasks.

The template used provides a setup based on current best practices, and makes starting a new project a breeze.

After running django-kickstart, you will have a functional django setup with it's own virtualenv preconfigured, with bower packages fetched and jQuery, modernizr, and some IE8 polyfills ready and included in the base.html template, SASS with Compass and Twitter Bootstrap (SASS port) ready, all relevant settings configured (including django-allauth), a development sqlite database ready to use and even a git repository initialized, with a good python + django .gitignore, and initial base commit.

Quickstart:

pip install django-kickstart

django-kickstart mynewproject

cd mynewproject/app

export ENV=dev

./manage.py runserver

Note that for manage.py to work, you need to set the environment variable ENV to dev.

Do not create new virtualenv: --no-venv Do not use bower: --no-bower (type django-kickstart -h for all options)

Features:

(for more details check About section)

• SASS + Compass
• Twitter Bootstrap
• jQuery + Modernizr

• IE Polyfills (for css3, media queries, html5 tags)

• Bower with django-bower for frontend package management

• django-pipeline for asset management
• Good directory structure

• Django setup with environment variables

• Auto-create a git repo and do an intial commit

• South for schema management

Directory Structure

app/ - the django project

apps/ - containts your custom django apps

data/

db/ - contains development sqlite databases

fixtures/ - contains database fixtures

lib/ - place to put external, contributed django apps or python modules that are not available from PyPi

public/ - only this dir needs to be publicly accessible

  media/ - Uploaded media

  static/ - static files

requirements/ - contains package requirements for pip, separated by environment

bin/ - various (non-django/python) scripts (bash,...) related to the project

conf/ - Config files or templated you need, for example apache virtual host or other server configs

docs/ - documentation

pyenv/ - A custom virtualenv for your project. This will be automatically created, and all dependencies will be downloaded

What and why:

• Modern and advanced CSS development with a setup for SASS, Compass, and optionally Bootstrap (the Bootstrap SASS port). Compass will require a setup of ruby and the gems specified in the GEMFILE of the newly created project, but if you don't want to use SASS, you can just delete the directory and use regular CSS without problems.

  (http://sass-lang.com, http://compass-style.org, https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass)

• Out of the box setup of jQuery and modernizr AND important polyfills, that provide fallback solutions for CSS3 selectors, styling, media queries, and html5 tags. (Namely: selectivizr, respond, pie and html5shiv)

• (Frontend) package management with Bower and django-bower. (http://bower.io, https://github.com/nvbn/django-bower)

  The packages are specified in settings.py by BOWER_INSTALLED_APPS and downloaded/updated with ./manage.py bower_install

• CSS and JS management with compression and merging by django-pipeline. (https://django-pipeline.readthedocs.org/‎)

• A good base.html template

• A sane way to manage settings: There is a base settings.py file, all locally relevant settings are configured with ENVIRONMENT variables.

  For easy development, you can just do export ENV=dev to get preconfigured development settings.

  To check all available env variables, check settings.py comments in the first few lines, which provide a list.

• Stubs for custom management commands (./manage.py commands) and templatetag libraries that you can just copy and paste.

• A custom public/ directory that contains static and media directories and is the only one that's accessible publicly.

• A good seperation of requirements, with a requirements.txt file and custom files for the different environments.

• Sample configuration files for other applications, like an Apache2 virtual host.

License:

Django-kickstart is under the BSD (3-clause) license. See LICENSE.txt

Authors:

Suggestions and contributions are very welcome!

• Christoph Herzog - http://theduke.at - chris@theduke.at

Behind the scenes:

The tool goes through these steps to set up the new project.

1. Start the new project.

django-admin.py startproject --template="https://github.com/theduke/django-kickstart/archive/master.zip" --extension="py,gitignore,txt,md,conf" PROJECTNAME

1. Create virtualenv.

cd PROJECT

Remove stub pyenv file:

rm -r pyenv

Create virtualenv with name pyenv:

virtualenv pyenv

Activate the new virtualenv:

. pyenv/bin/activate

1. Install requirements.

pip install -r app/requirements/development.txt

1. Several settings are configured with environment variables. To make it straight-forward for development, things are preconfigured for the dev environment. To activate it, just run:

   export ENV=dev

2. Create sqlite database for development.

app/manage.py syncdb app/manage.py migrate

1. Fetch bower packages.

app/manage.py bower_install

1. Set up a git repo

git init git add . git commit -m "Initial commit"

1. Start building your awesome site.

Updating bootstrap-sass

After updating the bootstrap-sass GEM, you need to copy the javascript and font assets!

cd to root (dir with this readme file in it) cp -r $(bundle show bootstrap-sass)/vendor/assets/fonts/* app/apps/{{ project_name }}/static/fonts/ cp -r $(bundle show bootstrap-sass)/vendor/assets/javascripts/* app/apps/{{ project_name }}/static/js/