Django Starter Pack

DjangoStarterPack is a powerful, ready-to-use collection of boilerplate code and configurations designed to save you days of setting up new Django projects.

Components

• Django: The go-to Python web framework for building scalable, maintainable applications with built-in ORM, authentication, and security features.
• Docker: Ensures consistency across development, testing, and production environments by containerizing the entire stack.
• PostgreSQL: A robust, ACID-compliant relational database known for its scalability, JSONB support, and strong concurrency handling.
• Redis: A high-performance in-memory store used for caching, real-time data processing, and Celery task brokering.
• Celery: A distributed task queue that enables asynchronous job processing to improve application responsiveness.
• Amazon S3: Scalable cloud storage with seamless integration for serving static and media files.
• Mailjet: A reliable email API for sending transactional and marketing emails with high deliverability.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

Python >=3.10.10 installed on your machine. Learn how to install multiple Python versions using Pyenv

An active python virtual environment. Learn how to activate virtual environments using Pyenv

Docker and Docker Compose v2 installed.

Development

Setting up the development environment

Change directory into the root of the project

Install the development requirements in your local virtual environment by executing in the terminal

pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

Create a .env file. Copy the contents of .env_sample into the newly created .env. Enter the necessary values for the keys listed

Build a new image and spin up the containers

docker compose up -d

After the containers are up, run the database migrations by running

docker compose exec backend python manage.py migrate

Other useful commands

Collect static files

docker compose exec backend python manage.py collectstatic

Login into the Django app container

docker compose exec -it backend /bin/sh

To create a new app

mkdir -p backend/apps/myapp
python manage.py startapp myapp backend/apps/myapp

If an update to the pre-commit hooks is required run in terminal,

pre-commit autoupdate

Package installation

Package installation is via pip-compile provided by the pip-tools package. Install this package in your environment.

To add a new package, update the corresponding requirements/<environment>.in depending on the package's purpose.

For instance, if the package will be used by all environments, add it to requirements/base.in, else if it will be used only in development add in requirements/dev.in. Packages only available in the production environment will be added in requirements/prod.in.

Compile the corresponding <environment>.txt by running the command

pip-compile --output-file=requirements/<environment>.txt requirements/<environment>.in

e.g pip-compile --output-file=requirements/base.txt requirements/base.in

After making these changes, rebuild your Docker image:

docker-compose down
docker-compose build
docker-compose up

To uninstall a package remove the package from the .in file and compile. Finally rebuild the image.

Running tests

To run all tests

docker compose exec backend pytest -vv -o cache_dir=/tmp/pytest_cache

To run tests on a specific module

docker compose exec backend pytest backend/apps/users -vv -o cache_dir=/tmp/pytest_cache

To avoid caching issues in Docker, we specify -o cache_dir=/tmp/pytest_cache.

Support

License

MIT License