- In the previous chapter, I explained how to set up a Django project and run the Django development server.
- In this chapter, you’ll learn the basics of creating dynamic web pages with Django.
As our first goal, let’s create a web page that outputs that famous example message: “Hello world.”
If you were publishing a simple “Hello world” web page without a web framework, you’d simply type “Hello world” into a text file, call it “hello.html“, and upload it to a directory on a web server somewhere. Notice in that process you’ve specified two key pieces of information about that web page:
- its contents (the string "Hello world")
- its URL (e.g. http://www.example.com/hello.html).
With Django, you specify those same two things, but in a different way :
- contents of the page
- are produced by a view function
- URL
- is specified in a URLconf.
First, let’s write our “Hello world” view function.
Within the inner mysite directory that we created in the last chapter, create an empty file called views.py. This Python module will contain our views for this chapter.
Make sure you put the file in the inner mysite directory, i.e. the *\mysite\mysite* directory, not the directory containing manage.py.
Our “Hello world” view is simple. Here’s the entire function, plus import statements, which you should type into the views.py file:
from django.http import HttpResponse
def hello(request):
return HttpResponse("Hello world")
Let’s step through this code one line at a time:
1. First, we import the class HttpResponse, which lives in the django.http module. We need to import this class because it’s used later in our code.
2. Next, we define a function called hello – the view function.
3. Each view function takes at least one parameter, called request by convention. This is an object that contains information about the current web request that has triggered this view, and is an instance of the class django.http.HttpRequest.
In this example, we don’t do anything with request, but it must be the first parameter of the view nonetheless.
Note that the name of the view function doesn’t matter; it doesn’t have to be named in a certain way in order for Django to recognize it. We’re calling it hello here, because that name clearly indicates the gist of the view, but it could just as well be named hello_wonderful_beautiful_world, or something equally revolting.
The next section, “Your First URLconf”, will shed light on how Django finds this function.
The function is a simple one-liner: it merely returns an HttpResponse object that has been instantiated with the text "Hello world".
The main lesson here is this:
a view is just a Python function that takes an HttpRequest as its first parameter and returns an instance of HttpResponse.
In order for a Python function to be a Django view, it must do these two things. (There are exceptions, but we’ll get to those later.)
If, at this point, you ran python manage.py runserver again, you’d still see the “Welcome to Django” message, with no trace of our “Hello world” view anywhere. That’s because our mysite project doesn’t yet know about the hello view; we need to tell Django explicitly that we’re activating this view at a particular URL.
Continuing our previous analogy of publishing static HTML files, at this point we’ve created the HTML file but haven’t uploaded it to a directory on the server yet.
To hook a view function to a particular URL with Django, we use a URLconf.
A URLconf is like a table of contents for your Django-powered web site.
Basically, it’s a mapping between URLs and the view functions that should be called for those URLs. It’s how you tell Django, “For this URL, call this code, and for that URL, call that code.” For example, when somebody visits the URL /foo/, call the view function foo_view(), which lives in the Python module views.py.
When you executed django-admin startproject in the previous chapter, the script created a URLconf for you automatically: the file urls.py. By default, it looks something like this:
"""mysite URL Configuration
The `urlpatterns` list routes URLs to views. For more information please see:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/topics/http/urls/
Examples:
Function views
1. Add an import: from my_app import views
2. Add a URL to urlpatterns: url(r'^$', views.home, name='home')
Class-based views
1. Add an import: from other_app.views import Home
2. Add a URL to urlpatterns: url(r'^$', Home.as_view(), name='home')
Including another URLconf
1. Import the include() function: from django.conf.urls import url, include
2. Add a URL to urlpatterns: url(r'^blog/', include('blog.urls'))
"""
from django.conf.urls import url
from django.contrib import admin
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
]
If we ignore the documentation comments at the top of the file, here’s the essence of a URLconf:
from django.conf.urls import url
from django.contrib import admin
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
]
Let’s step through this code one line at a time:
- The first line imports two functions from the django.conf.urls module: include which allows you to include a full Python import path to another URLconf module, and url which uses a regular expression to pattern match the URL in your browser to a module in your Django project.
- The second line calls the function admin from the django.contrib module. This function is called by the include function to load the URLs for the Django admin site.
- The third line is urlpatterns – a simple list of url() instances.
The main thing to note here is the variable urlpatterns, which Django expects to find in your URLconf module. This variable defines the mapping between URLs and the code that handles those URLs. To add a URL and view to the URLconf, just add a mapping between a URL pattern and the view function. Here’s how to hook in our hello view:
from django.conf.urls import url
from django.contrib import admin
from mysite.views import hello
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
url(r'^hello/$', hello),
]
We made two changes here:
- First, we imported the hello view from its module – mysite/views.py, which translates into mysite.views in Python import syntax. (This assumes mysite/views.py is on your Python path.)
- Next, we added the line
url(r'^hello/$', hello), to urlpatterns.- This line is referred to as a URLpattern.
- The url() function tells Django how to handle the URL that you are configuring.
- The first argument is a pattern-matching string (a regular expression; more on this in a bit) and the second argument is the view function to use for that pattern.
- url() can take other optional arguments as well, which we’ll cover in more depth in Chapter 7.
first, need to import the hello view from its module - DjangoWebProject1/views.py. (the module name can be found in settings.py "ROOT_URLCONF = 'DjangoWebProject1.urls'")
Figure - my result of page hello - mapping of URL and the hello view function
One more important detail we’ve introduced here is that ‘r‘ character in front of the regular expression string. This tells Python that the string is a “raw string” – its contents should not interpret backslashes. In normal Python strings, backslashes are used for escaping special characters – such as in the string “\n“, which is a one-character string containing a newline.
When you add the r to make it a raw string, Python does not apply its backslash escaping – so, “r'\n'” is a two-character string containing a literal backslash and a lowercase “n”. There’s a natural collision between Python’s usage of backslashes and the backslashes that are found in regular expressions, so it’s best practice to use raw strings any time you’re defining a regular expression in Django.
In a nutshell, we just told Django that any request to the URL /hello/ should be handled by the hello view function. It’s worth discussing the syntax of this URLpattern, as it may not be immediately obvious.
Although we want to match the URL /hello/, the pattern looks a bit different than that. Here’s why:
Django removes the slash from the front of every incoming URL before it checks the URLpatterns. This means that our URLpattern doesn’t include the leading slash in /hello/. At first, this may seem unintuitive, but this requirement simplifies things – such as the inclusion of URLconfs within other URLconfs, which we’ll cover in Chapter 7.
The pattern includes a caret (^) and a dollar sign ($). These are regular expression characters that have a special meaning:
- the caret means “require that the pattern matches the start of the string,”
- the dollar sign means “require that the pattern matches the end of the string.”
This concept is best explained by example. If we had instead used the pattern ^hello/(without a dollar sign at the end), then any URL starting with /hello/ would match, such as /hello/foo and /hello/bar, not just /hello/.
Similarly,
- if we had left off the initial caret character (i.e., hello/$), Django would match any URL that ends with hello/, such as /foo/bar/hello/.
- If we had simply used hello/, without a caret or dollar sign, then any URL containing hello/ would match, such as /foo/hello/bar.
Thus, we use both the caret and dollar sign to ensure that only the URL /hello/ matches – nothing more, nothing less.
Most of your URLpatterns will start with carets and end with dollar signs, but it’s nice to have the flexibility to perform more sophisticated matches. You may be wondering what happens if someone requests the URL /hello (that is, without a trailing slash). Because our URLpattern requires a trailing slash, that URL would not match.
However, by default, any request to a URL that doesn’t match a URLpattern and doesn’t end with a slash will be redirected to the same URL with a trailing slash (This is regulated by the APPEND_SLASH Django setting, which is covered in Appendix D).
The other thing to note about this URLconf is that we’ve passed the hello view function as an object without calling the function. This is a key feature of Python (and other dynamic languages): functions are first-class objects, which means you can pass them around just like any other variables. Cool stuff, eh?
To test our changes to the URLconf, start the Django development server, as you did in Chapter 1, by running the command python manage.py runserver from within your Python virtual environment. (If you left it running, that’s fine, too. The development server automatically detects changes to your Python code and reloads as necessary, so you don’t have to restart the server between changes.)
The server is running at the address http://127.0.0.1:8000/, so open up a web browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/hello/. You should see the text “Hello world” – the output of your Django view (Figure 2-1).
