Intro to PinaxKickstarting Your Django Apps

SyPy - November 2011

Roger Barnes @mindsocketroger@mindsocket.com.au http://gplus.to/mindsocket

Who am I

Roger Barnes BTech ICS

By day: Tech Lead/Applications Developer Java :(

By night: Up and coming Python ninja

Topics

Intro to Django Intro to Pinax Alternatives Development Tips Q&A

What is Django

”The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines”

Initially developed in an online news environment

Designed for rapid development

Django Framework

Object-relational mapper Automatic admin interface Elegant URL design Template system Caching More...

i18n, syndication, generic views, schema generation, development server, user model, scheduled jobs, test harness, ...

Django is...

… really well documented

https://docs.djangoproject.com

Example: More Betterer

My first Django app Goal 1: Learn some Python and Django Goal 2: Find out what photos people liked

Example: More Betterer

Very simple models Item (an image) Challenge (a showdown between 2 items)

Item manager counts challenge votes provides ordered list

Lessons from 1st Django app

Django alone isn't a quickstart/shortcut for common web 2.0 functionality

OAuth, social, tagging, voting front-end

HTML, CSS, JS

This is true of many web frameworks Either front- or back-end focussed

Some best practices aren't obvious or are evolving (eg class-based views in 1.3)

So...

What is Pinax

System for kickstarting Django projects

”Pinax takes care of the things that many siteshave in common so you can focus on what makes

your site different”

Quickly go from idea to launch (and beyond)

What is Pinax

Social friendly Comments Voting Notifications Profiles/Accounts/OAuth ...

Startup friendly Private beta Invite codes Starter projects

When to use Pinax

Great for building and maintaining multiple sites … quickly

Not as much benefit for a big enterprise app

Pinax - Pros and cons

Pros Has a lot to offer Easier to start with a pinax starter and adapt

Cons Misunderstood No recent releases (but active branches on github) Django compatibility (Pinax 0.9a1 needed tweaks to

work with Django 1.3)

Overall: worth it

Example: Now and Then

An application for aligning and overlaying historical images with modern equivalents

Example: Now and Then

My 2nd Django app Goal 1: Libraryhack entry - http://libraryhack.org/ Goal 2: Learn more Django & Python!

Approx. 1 month development Started without Pinax

got stuck on ”common functionality”

Pinax helped get past theme and account management issues

Example: Now and Then

Pinax – Primary Features

Project conventions Layout

Deployment

Requirements - pip dependencies Templates - quick prototyping Core and reusable apps

Back- and front-end functionality

Starter projects Basis for a Django site, several options

Pinax - Layout

|-- apps| |-- about| | |-- models.py| | |-- urls.py| | |-- views.py| |-- my_foo_app| | |-- ... | |-- ...| | |-- ... |-- deploy| |-- pinax.fcgi| `-- pinax.wsgi|-- dev.db

|-- fixtures| `-- initial_data.json|-- locale| |-- ...|-- manage.py|-- media| |-- css| | `-- site_tabs.css| |-- ...|-- requirements| |-- base.txt| `-- project.txt|-- settings.py|-- templates| |-- about| |-- account| |-- ...|-- tests| |-- ...|-- urls.py

Pinax

Requirements (pip) Base

what pinax needs Project

what you want to add

For Now and Then:

PILaino-convertdjango-extensionsdjango-memcache-statusdjango-jenkinsseleniumpyvirtualdisplayMySQL-pythonpython-memcachedflickrapisouthdjango-taggingdjango-votingPyYAMLnltkminidetectorgeopy

Pinax

Apps account and profile management

openid, e-mail verification, password management notifications and activity streams private betas and waiting lists badges tagging wikis, forums and blogs task tracking friend and follower relations

Pinax

Starter projects zero basic account static private_beta cms_company intranet social cms_holidayhouse company sample_group code

Pinax

Fairly well documentedhttp://pinaxproject.com/docs/

Code on github

Pinax project status

Still in active development (see github) A new release pending Better ecosystem management

Trying to solve the ”misunderstood” problem http://pinaxproject.com/ecosystem/

Pinax isn't

A silver bullet for front-end BYO UX, design, HTML, CSS, JS skills

Some solutions Twitter bootstrap – Pinax has a new theme Growing collection of other themes on offer HTML5 boilerplate Other template + less/CSS + Javascript library

Pinax – Idea to Launch

The next big social networkmytweetbooktubelyplus.com

Domain name is not currently registered. Available for you now!

Pinax – Idea to Launch

Steps mkvirtualenv --no-site-packages

mytweetbooktubelyplus pip install Pinax pinax-admin setup_project -b social

mytweetbooktubelyplus cd mytweetbooktubelyplus/ git init git commit -am ”Initial commit”

Pinax – Idea to Launch

Steps (continued) edit settings.py

pip install PIL Better: add to requirements or remove dependent app

python manage.py syncdb python manage.py runserver

Profit!

Alternatives to Pinax

Hand-pick your own bundled apps PyPI Djangopackages.com

Other starter projects on github Eg: django-party-pack

Development tips

South Schema management extension for Django Handles updates to existing/populated DB

eg: Add/change a column in dev Generate/deploy code to do same in test/prod

Integrates with django's management tools

Development tips

Environment/package management virtualenv + pip (+ virtualenvwrapper) For more complex deploys, look at buildout local_settings.py (dev/test/prod)

Contains environment specific config And passwords, add to .gitignore

In settings.py

try: from local_settings import * except ImportError: pass

Development tips - Testing

Django + unittest2 Fixtures for testing models (tests.json) Django Client to test views (request/response)

def test_point_list(self): """Tests that point_list returns a valid list of lists""" fusion = Fusion() fusion.points = "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8" self.failUnlessEqual(fusion.point_list(), [[1,2,3,4],[5,6,7,8]])

def test_fusion_edit_update(self): self._login() response = self.client.post('/fusion/edit/1/', {'points': '', 'cropthen': ''}) self.assertRedirects(response, '/fusion/view/1/')

Development tips – Testing

TODO UI tests Selenium or similar to test UI, esp. javascript

def test_via_selenium(self): from pyvirtualdisplay import Display from selenium import webdriver display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600)) display.start()

browser = webdriver.Firefox() browser.get('http://myurl...')

# TODO …

Dev tips - Continuous Integration

Jenkins unittest2

django-jenkins

coverage

Build triggered by commit (or polled)

Development tips - Deployment

Fast all the way to production git pull - ok for simple application

TODO: Build pipeline TODO: Continuous Deployment

Production performance Apache + mod-wsgi – ok

Use pinax.wsgi May need a little hacking to get paths right TODO: try nginx + uWSGI or similar TODO: High availability + reverse proxy

Development tips – Source Control

DVCS good - Git(Hub), several alternatives Avoid old tech (svn, cvs, vss) Embrace branching, merging, regular commits Fork other people's repos

Pull new changes Pull-request – send your improvements upstream

Works with pip

pip install -e git+https://github.com/pinax/pinax-theme-bootstrap#egg=pinax-theme-bootstrap

Development tips

References

Django

https://www.djangoproject.com/

http://djangopackages.com/

Pinax

http://pinaxproject.com/ & http://pinaxproject.com/ecosystem/

https://github.com/pinax/pinax

http://pinaxproject.com/blog/2011/10/10/djangocon-talk-pinax-after-three-years/

My apps/code

http://bit.ly/morebetterer

http://nowandthen.mindsocket.com.au/

https://github.com/mindsocket/

Twitter Bootstrap

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

Q&A