Django community: Community blog posts RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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Django and React Boilerplate as an Asset in Software Development
Here at Vinta we believe that programmers, not processes, nor code, are the most important assets on software engineering. Due to that, we believe in using every tool available in order to facilitate our programmers' lives. One of our favorites is our boilerplate. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, a boilerplate is "any code block that is reus -
How I test my DRF serializers
How I test my DRF serializers In this blog post, I will show the whats and whys on testing Django REST Framework serializers. First, some context. Here is the model setup we are going to use for this example: from django.db import models class Bike(models.Model): COLOR_OPTIONS = (('yellow', 'Yellow'), ('red', 'Red&# -
Don't forget the stamps: testing email content in Django
When developing a web app how often do you check the emails you send are all working properly? Not as often as your web pages, right? That's ok, don't feel guilty, emails are hard to test and they are often someone's else responsibility to write and take care. This doesn't mean we should give up on them. There are some things we can do to prevent e -
Contributing to Django Framework is easier than you think
For those who are starting to code and wish to make open source, sometimes it is hard to start. The idea of contributing with that fancy and wonderful lib that you love can sound a little bit scary. Lucky for us many of those libs have room for whoever is willing to start. They also give us the support that we need. Pretty sweet, right? Do you know -
Advanced Django querying: sorting events by date
Imagine the situation where our application has events (scheduled tasks, appointments, python conferences across the world) happening in different moments of time. Almost anything with a date attached to it. We want to display them in a simple list to the user. Given we are in February 2017 (the date this post was written), what would be the best w -
DjangoCon Europe 2017 was awesome!
DjangoCon Europe happened in one of the most historical cities in Italy! Florence was the most exciting place to be around in Europe, if you are a Django enthusiast, from April 3rd to April 7th. The event had the presence of some important names on it, like Andrew Godwin and Marc Tamlyn, both core developers at Django, and Tom Christie, author of t -
[pt-BR] Organizando o Django Girls Recife
No Brasil, as mulheres são maioria nas escolas e universidades e representam 60% das pessoas que concluíram cursos superiores. Apesar disso, em cursos de exatas, representam apenas 20% do quantitativo. Esse cenário se repete não só no Brasil, mas em todo o mundo. Nas áreas tecnológicas não é diferente. TI é, ainda, um mundo majoritariamente masculino. Foi com o intuito de diversificar esse contexto que o Django Girls foi criado. -
Organizing Django Girls Recife
In Brazil, women are the majority in schools and universities and represent 60% of the people who have a university degree. Despite this, in STEM, they represent only 20% of the quantitative. This scenario is present not only in Brazil but all over the world. In technological areas, it’s no different. IT is still a mostly male world. It was with the intention of diversifying this context that the Django Girls was created. -
Going to Technical Events is Awesome: A DjangoCon Experience
We just got back from DjangoCon US! It was quite a marathon for us because Filipe Ximenes and I have been to PyBay and DjangoCon AU too, right before DjangoCon US. Besides having a great time presenting our talks, it was awesome to meet new people and reunite with old friends. From our blog, you’d guess that we really enjoy conferences. We do incentivize collaborators to attend them since we believe it's very important to keep in touch with the community. -
Multitenancy: juggling customer data in Django
Suppose you want to build a new SaaS (Software as a Service) application. Suppose your application will store sensitive data from your customers. What is the best way to guarantee the isolation of the data and make sure information from one client does not leak to the other? The answer to that is: it depends. It depends on the number of customers y -
Django REST Framework Read & Write Serializers
Django REST Framework (DRF) is a terrific tool for creating very flexible REST APIs. It has a lot of built-in features like pagination, search, filters, throttling, and many other things developers usually don't like to worry about. And it also lets you easily customize everything so you can make your API work the way you want. There are many gene -
Taming Irreversibility with Feature Flags (in Python)
Feature Flags are a very simple technique to make features of your application quickly toggleable. The way it works is, everytime we change some behavior in our software, a logical branch is created and this new behavior is only accessible if some specific configuration variable is set or, in certain cases, if the application context respects some -
Reactify Django
# Reactify Django is coming. ... -
Django development with Docker — Testing, Continuous Integration and Docker Hub
At the end of my last post about Django development with Docker, we saw how to improve our development environment by implementing these features:Accessing our database from outside the containerInstalling different requirements for each environmentUsing different settings for each environmentEnabling server reloading on code changesBut we did not execute or write any test, even more we are not using any kind of Continuous Integration. Let’s see how to implement these features.IntroductionDuring this post, we will address the following points:How can we configure and run our tests inside a Docker container?How can we integrate our application with a Continuous Integration (C.I.) server and implement Continuous Delivery?Is it possible to Upload our images to Docker Hub from our C.I. server?While we configure travis ci as our Continuous Integration server, we will run our tests and upload a new image to Docker Hub.Note: This post will not go deep in travis and docker hub explications, the main focus is in using them for our intentions.Writing & Running testsFirst, enumerate what we need to accomplish in this section:Install a test framework and configure it.Configure an in-memory database for themWrite some tests for our applicationRun our tests in a containerWe’re going to use pytest, a ... -
Ansible provision/deploy setup
I never got around to write down the ansible setup I figured out (together with others, of course, at my previous job) for deploying/provisioning django websites. The whole setup (as a cookiecutter template) can be found in https://github.com/reinout/cookiecutter-djangosite-template . The relevant code is in the ansible/ directory. Note: this is a "cookiecutter template" from which you can generate a project so you'll see some {{ }} and {% %}: when you create the actual project these items will be filled in. My goal was to keep the setup simple and safe. With "safe", I mean that you normally cannot accidentally do something wrong. And it was intended for getting one website project onto the server(s). It is not a huge ansible setup to set up the whole infra in one fell swoop. First the inventory files: Yes, multiple: there are two of them. production_inventory and staging_inventory. The safe aspect is that we used to have a single inventory file with [production] and [staging] headings in it. If you wanted to update staging, you had to add --limit staging on the command line. If you forgot that... With two separate files, you never have this problem. Accidents are much less likely ... -
GeoDjango and PostgreSQL
I recently had to set up GeoDjango on a site that used PostgreSQL as a database. As the online instructions for doing this were less than totally clear, I decided to write down how I did it. -
Django Local 404 Page
Learn how to display and customize a 404 page locally. -
Best React Books 2018
List of current React/JavaScript books. -
Angular 6|5 Tutorial: Integrating Angular with Django
In the previous Angular 6 tutorial we've seen how to build a CRUD web application with a Django REST framework API back-end. In this tutorial we'll see how we can integrate the Angular 6 front-end with the Django back-end. After creating both the back-end and front-end apps we need to integrate them i.e instead of taking the approach where both applications are completely separated we'll serve the front-end application using a Django view. In development we'll have both Django development server and Angular/Webpack dev server running but for production we'll only need a Django server. To use this approach you need to tweak the Webpack settings of your front-end project, use the webpack-bundle-tracker (from npm) and use the django-webpack-loader package (from PyPI) The webpack-bundle-tracker is a Webpack plugin that generates a stats file containing meta data information about the assets of your front-end application generated by Webpack. We'll start by installing the webpack-bundle-tracker module then update the Webpack configuration file to make use of this plugin. npm install webpack-bundle-tracker --save Next you need to eject the Webpack configuration from the Angular 6 CLI using ng eject If the ejection is successful you'll find a webpack.config.js in the root of your ... -
QuerySet Filters on Many-to-many Relations
Django ORM (Object-relational mapping) makes querying the database so intuitive, that at some point you might forget that SQL is being used in the background. This year at the DjangoCon Europe Katie McLaughlin was giving a talk and mentioned one thing that affects the SQL query generated by Django ORM, depending on how you call the QuerySet or manager methods. This particularity is especially relevant when you are creating your QuerySets dynamically. Here it is. When you have a many-to-many relationship, and you try to filter objects by the fields of the related model, every new filter() method of a QuerySet creates a new INNER JOIN clause. I won't discuss whether that's a Django bug or a feature, but these are my observations about it. The Books and Authors Example Let's create an app with books and authors, where each book can be written by multiple authors. # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-from __future__ import unicode_literalsfrom django.db import modelsfrom django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _from django.utils.encoding import python_2_unicode_compatible@python_2_unicode_compatibleclass Author(models.Model): first_name = models.CharField(_("First name"), max_length=200) last_name = models.CharField(_("Last name"), max_length=200) author_name = models.CharField(_("Author name"), max_length=200) class Meta: verbose_name = _("Author") verbose_name_plural = _("Authors") ordering = ("author_name",) def __str__(self): return self.author_name@python_2_unicode_compatibleclass Book(models.Model): title = ... -
Djangocon: want more woman in tech? Start with Django Girls - Sara Heins
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2018 European djangocon.) She lives in Kansas, USA. Kansas is great for women in tech, there are many initiatives. The one she is most enthousiastic about is django girls. "We are raising our girls to be perfect and we're raising our boys to be brave". If a woman applies for a job, she fulfills 100% of the demands, if a man applies, he fullfills on average 60%... Why does programming make girls brave? You are going to mistakes and you're going to fix them. How do you get more girls to try it? One of the best ways is to organize a django girls workshop. There are some qualifications you don't need. You don't need to be perfect. You only have to be brave :-) You don't need to be a savvy event planner. There's lots of info on github. There are pre-made websites. Lots of resources. You don't need to have a large budget. Qualifications you do need: You need to be able to solve problems. You need to be open to learning new things. You need to want to constantly improve. You'll be busy with it for half a ... -
Djangocon: friday lightning talks
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2018 European djangocon.) The stenographers - Sheryll and Andrew The stenographers are the ones that provide LIVE speech to text subtitles for the talks. Wow. They use "shorthand machines" for steno. It is like a piano where you press multiple keys to form words. On wednesday the speakers talked 46000 words... How fast do people talk? Anything between 180 and 250, though 300 also occurs. The handiest are speakers that speak in a regular tempo. And not too fast. They ask presenters for notes and texts beforehand. That helps the software pick the right words. Pytest-picked - Ana Paula Gomes Say you have a codebase that has tests that take a long time. You've just changed a few files and don't want to run the full test before the commit. You could run git status and figure out the files to test. But you can do it automatically with pytest-picked. It is a small plugin, but she wants to improve it with better guessing and also with support for testing what changed on a branch. How to build a treehouse - Harry Biddle A talk about building actual treehouses! One of ... -
Djangocon: survival tricks and tools for remote developers - Alessio Bragadini
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2018 European djangocon.) He works in a company that has many remote workers. He is one of them. The core question for him: "how do I manage to work remotely in an effective way without much stress". There is a difference between a remote-friendly company and a remote-first company. Remote-friendly is a company that still has an office. But you're allowed to work from home and you don't have strict work hours. Remote-first changes the entire structure/culture. Can agile help? Test driven development. First you make the tests. That's handy for remote teams. It sets strict boundaries where you can take over the work in a way that you do not have when sitting behind the same keyboard. No code ownership. Anybody can work on everything all the time. Shared "visual backlog" (boards and so). But... "agile" also says that teams that work face-to-face are more efficient in conveying information. But note that the agile manifesto is many years old now. Face-to-fase means proximity, but also truthfulness. So: no documents that can mean anything, but truthful conversation. Eh: we are now used to slack, skype, whatsapp. This is 99% of what ... -
Djangocon: an ode to OAuth - Akos Hochrein
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2018 European djangocon.) A show of hands. Who use a password manager? 90% of the hands went up. Who uses at least two? Some 40%. Passwords are irritating. There have been initiatives to "outsource" passwords. Openid, oauth, oauth2.0. On to OAuth2.0. It started at twitter. They started with OpenID, but that only handled login, not access to resources. In the end, oauth2.0 came out. (Note: he said "openid connect", but that's build on oauth2.0, so he must have meant plain "openid" if I'm correct. But it might mean that I'm not totally correct in this summary, or I heard it incorrectly). There are multiple ways to work with oauth2.0. He showed the "authorisation code grant". I can't visualize his diagram here, look at the video for that. There are some terms: Resource owner. Client: you, behind your browser. Authentication server: this is where you will log in ("log in with facebook/google/etc") and where the Resource server: this is where the data is. Akos works at prezi. The backend is actually a django site. But there were many customizations to auth, sessions and user objects. At one point, they wanted to make ... -
Djangocon: it's about time - Russell Keith-Magee
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2018 European djangocon.) Handling time and timezones is complex and painful. It starts with leap years. Every four years, there is a leap year. Except every 100 years. Except except every 400 years. The latter two rules are from the gregorian calendar, which replaced the julian calander in 1582 (at least, in parts of the world...) When did the "october revolution" happen? Well, either 25 oct or 7 november 1918. Russia still had the Julian calender at that time :-) Year? Well, some countries use years based on the lunar cycle... Or they count from a different starting point. In IT we had the Y2k problem. In 20 years time there'll be the 32 bit epoch overflow. It already crashed the AOL mail servers (!) years ago. In python, there's the time module. It represents how your computer thinks about time. It isn't terribly useful if you actually want to do something with it that you're going to show to the user. The datetime module is the one you'll probably want to use. But do you use a date or a datetime? A date doesn't have a timezone. The day Hawkings ...
