CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythondjango
simon
simon

Reputation: 2946

How to set up a local dev environment for Django

Python web development newbie question here. I'm coming from PHP/Laravel and there you have Homestead which is a pre-configured Vagrant box for local development. In a so-called Homestead file, you configure everything such as webserver, database or PHP version. Are there any similar pre-configured dev environments for Django?

I already googled and there don't seem to be any official or widely-used Vagrant boxes for Django. The official Django tutorial even tells you how to install and set up Apache and your preferred database. This is a lot of work everytime you want to create a new Django project, especially if those projects run in different production environments. All the other tutorials I've found just explain how you set up virtual environments with venv or the like. But that doesn't seem to be sufficient to me. What you obviously want is a dev environment that is as close as possible to your production environment, so you need some kind of virtual machines.

I'm a little bit confused right now. Do you just grab some plain Ubuntu (or any other OS) Vagrant box and install everything yourself? Don't you use Vagrant at all but something else? Did I miss something and the Python web development workflow is completely different?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 504

Answers (2)

deceze
deceze

Reputation: 522024

The typical local development in Django just uses the builtin web server and an SQLite database. The steps to get that up and running are:

  1. Ensure you have the desired version of Python installed.
  2. Create a virtual env to isolate libraries needed for your project from the rest of the system (this is optional by highly recommended, I'd actually recommend using Poetry).
  3. Install Django, probably via pip.
  4. Run manage.py runserver (and migrate the database and set up a superuser, yada yada).

That's pretty much it and sufficient for local development. What you need to be aware of is that some differences exist between SQLite and Postgres, MySQL etc., and if you hit the spots where the difference is important, you'll want to set up your targeted database as well to develop directly against it. That can probably happen in a Docker container if that makes sense for you. But there's little reason to put Django into a container during development, unless your project is especially complex and requires simulating certain conditions which the builtin server somehow can't.

Upvotes: 3

Balaji Ambresh
Balaji Ambresh

Reputation: 5037

Does this help?

$ python3 -m venv my_env # create your virtual environment
$ source my_env/bin/activate # Any package you install will be inside this environment
$ pip install -r requirements.txt # can also install packages indivdually
$ deactivate # get out of the isolated environment

Here's the doc

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions