Intro to Pinax: Kickstarting Your Django Apps
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This document provides an overview and introduction to Pinax, an open source framework built on Django that aims to provide common functionality needed for web applications out of the box. It discusses what Pinax is, when it should be used, its key features like reusable apps and starter projects, alternatives to Pinax, and tips for development using Pinax like testing, deployment and source control best practices.
![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/')](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2011-11sypypinax-111103005807-phpapp02/85/Intro-to-Pinax-Kickstarting-Your-Django-Apps-31-320.jpg)
Intro to Pinax: Kickstarting Your Django Apps
- 1. Intro to Pinax Kickstarting Your Django Apps SyPy - November 2011 Roger Barnes @mindsocket roger@mindsocket.com.au http://gplus.to/mindsocket
- 2. Who am I Roger Barnes BTech ICS By day: Tech Lead/Applications Developer Java :( By night: Up and coming Python ninja
- 3. Topics Intro to Django Intro to Pinax Alternatives Development Tips Q&A
- 4. What is Django ”The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines” Initially developed in an online news environment Designed for rapid development
- 5. 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, ...
- 6. Django is... … really well documented https://docs.djangoproject.com
- 7. Example: More Betterer My first Django app Goal 1: Learn some Python and Django Goal 2: Find out what photos people liked
- 8. Example: More Betterer Very simple models Item (an image) Challenge (a showdown between 2 items) Item manager counts challenge votes provides ordered list
- 9. st Lessons from 1 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)
- 10. What is Pinax System for kickstarting Django projects ”Pinax takes care of the things that many sites have in common so you can focus on what makes your site different” Quickly go from idea to launch (and beyond)
- 11. What is Pinax Social friendly Comments Voting Notifications Profiles/Accounts/OAuth ... Startup friendly Private beta Invite codes Starter projects
- 12. When to use Pinax Great for building and maintaining multiple sites … quickly Not as much benefit for a big enterprise app
- 13. 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
- 14. Example: Now and Then An application for aligning and overlaying historical images with modern equivalents
- 15. 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
- 16. Example: Now and Then
- 17. 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
- 18. Pinax - Layout |-- apps |-- fixtures | |-- about | `-- initial_data.json | | |-- models.py |-- locale | | |-- urls.py | |-- ... | | |-- views.py |-- manage.py | |-- my_foo_app |-- media | | |-- ... | |-- css | |-- ... | | `-- site_tabs.css | | |-- ... | |-- ... |-- deploy |-- requirements | |-- pinax.fcgi | |-- base.txt | `-- pinax.wsgi | `-- project.txt |-- dev.db |-- settings.py |-- templates | |-- about | |-- account | |-- ... |-- tests | |-- ... |-- urls.py
- 19. Pinax For Now and Then: Requirements (pip) PIL Base aino-convert what pinax needs django-extensions django-memcache-status Project django-jenkins selenium what you want to add pyvirtualdisplay MySQL-python python-memcached flickrapi south django-tagging django-voting PyYAML nltk minidetector geopy
- 20. 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
- 21. Pinax Starter projects zero basic account static private_beta cms_company intranet social cms_holidayhouse company sample_group code
- 22. Pinax Fairly well documented http://pinaxproject.com/docs/ Code on github
- 23. 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/
- 24. 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
- 25. Pinax – Idea to Launch The next big social network mytweetbooktubelyplus.com Domain name is not currently registered. Available for you now!
- 26. 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”
- 27. 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!
- 28. Alternatives to Pinax Hand-pick your own bundled apps PyPI Djangopackages.com Other starter projects on github Eg: django-party-pack
- 29. 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
- 30. 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
- 31. 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/')
- 32. 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 …
- 33. Dev tips - Continuous Integration Jenkins Build triggered by commit (or polled) unittest2 django-jenkins coverage
- 34. 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
- 35. 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
- 36. Development tips
- 37. 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/
- 38. Q&A