Short guide how to install Django

We will be discussing how to install Django within a virtual environment. To do this, you will need to have Python3, Pip3, and VirtualEnv installed on your system. Before proceeding, I recommend verifying that all of these commands are available on your operating system. To install VirtualEnv, simply use the Pip3 command.

pip3 install virtualenv

Create project directory

Le's create a working directory with any name you like by using the mkdir command, which is standard on unix-like systems. For this example, I will name the directory "django_install".

mkdir django_install

Switch into created directory using "cd" command.

cd django_install

Creation of python3 virtual environment using virtualenv

In the directory we just created, we can create a Python3 virtual environment by using the "virtualenv" command. This will allow us to have a separate environment for our project that is isolated from the system's global Python environment.

virtualenv -p python3 .

Running above command will create two folders in the directory, "bin" and "lib". We can check our current folder structure by "ls" command. The 'ls' command is used to list files and directories on every unix-like system.

ls -la

Activation of virtual environment

When we created virtual environment we need to activate it. We are going to use following command:

source bin/activate

We can recognize that we are in an active virtual environment when our Bash prompt starts with the name of the parent folder, in this case (django_install).

We need to install Django using pip command now

When working in an active virtual environment, we can utilize the "pip" and "python" commands without having to specify a version (e.g. "pip3" or "python3.9"). We are going to use pip command for installing django package.

pip install django

Start new django project using django-admin command

We will use the django-admin command to create a new Django project. We can call it "testdjango" but feel free to name it as you want.

django-admin startproject testdjango

Creation of new Django app

A well-designed Django project should have multiple apps that each solve only one problem. This helps keep your project manageable and organized. For example, a blog website might have one app for managing blog posts, another for managing user accounts, and a third for managing comments. So we are going to start our first app. We need to go into newly created folder "testdjango":

cd testdjango

When we are in folder we can utilize the manage.py file to carry out various administrative operations related to Django. We will create new app called "polls":

python manage.py startapp polls

Migrate Database and create superuser account

We need to create our first database migration in order to set up the necessary tables for Django's functioning, such as user accounts, sessions, passwords, etc.
We are going to use manage.py again, makemigrations usually check for changes in DB models and prepare necessary migration files, migrate command execute migration.

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

Once we have successfully migrated our database, it is time to create a super user account. This account will have all privileges in the system. You will be asked a few questions, such as your email address, nickname, and password.

python manage.py createsuperuser

Now we need to start local development server

The last step is to fire up a local development server, which is not intended for production use cases but is very handy during the development process. The server can automatically restart itself in case any changes are detected in your files.

python manage.py runserver

Now open your browser and visit http://127.0.0.1:8000 address and you should see Django welcome page.