Django

I’ve been in the process of running the Django tutorial ( https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/intro/tutorial01/ ) and have been quite impressed not only with Django overall, but with the fact that the tutorial is up-to-date (nothing was incorrect). I’m using Django 4.0 ( https://www.djangoproject.com/download/ ) running with Python 3.10.1 ( https://www.python.org/downloads/ ). I have bigger plans than the tutorial, but it was nice to run through it and not have issues.

I turned to Django second after trying Ruby and Rails, and having no luck installing Rails. Rails kept failing to install because it couldn’t build certain Ruby Rail gems around SQLite. After two Rails installation attempts, one of them through Chocolatey, I gave up and went the Python route. When I installed Django and started the tutorial and came to the database section using SQLite, it all worked flawlessly. I’m sure glad I went with Python and Django. I should have turned to Python to begin with, since I’m into all things Python everywhere else.

In the process of building this tutorial wesite, I (re)learned a simple Python one-liner to find where the site-specific files for a pakage are located. For Django it’s:

python -c "import django; print(django.__path__)
['C:\\Python\\Python310\\lib\\site-packages\\django']

Which helps to find the subfolder where code examples are located. Before anybody asks, I have Python installed in the C drive root under C:\Python. Short paths without spaces are always preferable, even under Windows.

Another lesson learned concerns a feature of Chocolatey ( https://chocolatey.org/ ). It’s labeled the package manager for windows. It installs and tracks all the common utilities you need for Windows development such as git, notepad++, and 7-zip, just to name but three. It’s better to use one centralized tool than to hunt them all down individually and install them that way. You can run Chocolatey from the command line or you can install the Chocolatey GUI and manage it all from there.

Written in Powershell, one of the Powershell features you get is refreshenv. I use that command quite a bit when I’m editing environmental variables via System Properties | Environment Variables and I need to update the current Powershell instance without restarting it. I can’t speak highly enough of either Chocolatey or it’s many little helpers. If you’re not using it, you should.