Introduction

django-project-skel is useful both for kicking off new projects and learning about django and/or ReactJS. It unifies Django, ReactJS, and Webpack to allow for hot code updates, both in the UI (using the excellent webpack-dev-server) and in the backend (using Django's native reloading capability). Django is also configured to use dj_static, which allows for reasonable production performance when serving static assets without the additional hassle of configuring a secondary webserver.

Requirements

django-project-skel has the following requirements to get started (installing them is described in the following section):

• The Anaconda python distribution
• nodejs + npm

Setting up development environment

First, install the anaconda python distribution. You can confirm that python is correctly installed by looking at the output of the following command:

$ python -V
Python 2.7.9 :: Continuum Analytics, Inc.

You should see Continuum Analytics in the version string.

Next, install Django and Matt's binstar repository (for a couple of packages not natively available in Anaconda):

conda config --add channels https://conda.binstar.org/mhworth
conda install Django==1.8.1

You can test that django is installed correctly by running

$ django-admin --version
1.8.1

Install nodejs, npm, and grunt. nodejs and npm can be installed from the node js website, https://nodejs.org/. After node and npm are installed, you can install grunt with the following command:

npm install -g grunt

That's it! You're ready to create your first project.

Starting a new project

Run the following command (substitute "newproject" with whatever you want your project name to be):

django-admin startproject --template=https://github.com/mhworth/django-project-skel/archive/master.zip newproject

Once your project has been created, run the following commands to install the dev dependencies:

cd <your project root>
conda install --file requirements.ana
cd <project_name>/ui
npm install

That's all; you're ready to develop.

Developing

Run the following two commands in separate terminals to start up the development servers:

./manage.py runserver

cd <project_name>/ui
grunt webpack-dev-server

That will start the django dev server, running on port 8000 and the Webpack dev server running on 8080.