Awesome

Django Boilerplate is a fast, robust and future-proof base template to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed.

• Twitter bootstrap (uses LessCSS) and jQuery
• Split settings files for dev/test/prod environments
• South for database migrations
• Caching with Redis and Cache Machine
• Custom template tags, Forms examples, etc.
• django-debug-toolbar

Quick Start

Create a project directory, setup virtualenv, clone the project and setup the dependencies:

# Clone django-boilerplate into project directory
$ git clone git@github.com:metachris/django-boilerplate.git <YOUR_PROJECT_DIR>
$ cd <YOUR_PROJECT_DIR>

# Create and activate virtual env, and install dependencies
$ virtualenv <ENV_DIR>
$ . <ENV_DIR>/bin/activate
$ pip install -r dependencies.txt

# Setting up Twitter Bootstrap
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

# Build bootstrap for the first time
$ cd app/static/twitter-bootstrap
$ make bootstrap

Twitter-Bootstrap

Bootstrap is added as a git submodule (into boilerplate/static/twitter-bootstrap). Make sure you have the LessCSS compiler (lessc) and uglifyjs installed for the build toolchain to work. To build bootstrap, execute the following command in boilerplate/static/twitter-bootstrap:

$ make build

South: Easy Database Schema Migrations

South detects model changes and makes schema migrations extremely easy as well as reversible and documented. It is basically used as a replacement for syncdb. The South tutorial shows how to easily setup South for an all new app or converting an existing one.

South with a brand new app

Before any models are created, run syncdb once to add the tables for the apps.

$ python manage.py syncdb

After the initial db setup, store the schema:

$ python manage.py schemamigration <APP_NAME> --initial

South with an existing app

When models are already saved in the database, we need to run syncdb to add the tables for the south app, and then convert_to_south <appname>:

$ python manage.py syncdb
$ python manage.py convert_to_south <APP_NAME>

Schema Migrations

After changing a model we need to create the migration file, and then apply it to update the schema in the database:

# Create migration file
$ ./manage.py schemamigration <APP_NAME> --auto

# Apply migration
$ ./manage.py migrate <APP_NAME>