Django HTML5 Boilerplate

Introduction

This is a starting template for Django website projects using (a slightly modified version of) HTML5 Boilerplate.

Features

• A Django project skeleton
• A slightly now less modified version of the HTML5 Boilerplate
• django.contrib.staticfiles url conf set up for serving static media
• A settings_local.py.ex template file that allows you to set environment-specific settings
• A test_all.py script that allows you to run the unit tests for all applications in INSTALLED_APPS
• Requirements files for pip (details below)

How to use the template

Using pip and virtualenv makes it a lot easier to set up a new project using this boilerplate. If you're unfamiliar with virtualenv, I've found a few good reads explaining the concept.

Start by creating your virtual environment (I'm using Doug Hellman's virtualenvwrapper), by the way:

    mkvirtualenv projectname --no-site-packages

I've included two separate requirements files:

• requirements_min.txt contains the minimum requirements to get this up and running
• requirements_plus.txt contains a few extra Python packages that I use in most of my projects (South, PIL, etc.)

Install one of the requirements files:

    pip install -r <requirements_min.txt or requirements_plus.txt>

When you're finished installing requirements, you'll need to set up your settings_local.py file:

    # set path
    cd <path-to-project>/
    
    # Rename the project folder 
    mv projectname <project_name>
    
    # copy settings_local.py
    cp settings_local.py.ex settings_local.py
    
    # Edit settings_local.py
    vim settings_local.py

After you configure your local settings (database, etc.) you're ready to run syncdb:

    python manage.py syncdb

Once that's completed you can boot up the dev server:

    python manage.py runserver

Then open up your browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:8000 -- if all went well you should see the "It works!" page.