FAQ: Using Django

    • The environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is set to a fully-qualified Python module (i.e. “mysite.settings”).
    • Said module is on sys.path (import mysite.settings should work).

    We happen to think our template engine is the best thing since chunky bacon, but we recognize that choosing a template language runs close to religion. There’s nothing about Django that requires using the template language, so if you’re attached to Jinja2, Mako, or whatever, feel free to use those.

    The one exception is: If you use a different database library, you won’t get to use Django’s automatically-generated admin site. That app is coupled to the Django database layer.

    1. In your settings file, you’ll need to define as the full path to a directory where you’d like Django to store uploaded files. (For performance, these files are not stored in the database.) Define MEDIA_URL as the base public URL of that directory. Make sure that this directory is writable by the web server’s user account.
    2. Add the or ImageField to your model, defining the option to specify a subdirectory of to use for uploaded files.
    3. All that will be stored in your database is a path to the file (relative to ). You’ll most likely want to use the convenience url attribute provided by Django. For example, if your is called mug_shot, you can get the absolute path to your image in a template with {{ object.mug_shot.url }}.

    Sometimes your templates all need the same thing. A common example would be dynamically generated menus. At first glance, it seems logical to add a common dictionary to the template context.