Django - Postgres Template

1. Create a directory, and virtual environment

• Create a project directory, in this case I use “django-postgres”

mkdir django-postgres

• Point to django-postgres directory

cd django-postgres

• Build virtual environment for the directory

python -m venv env

• The last step is activating virtual environment, so you’ve to run the command below

source env/bin/activate

• Check Python version

python --version

2. Install Django After successfully creating the directory and virtual environment, it’s time to install Django. Use the package manager pip to install Django.

pip install Django

3. Start the Django Project

django-admin startproject django_psql

I successfully created project called “django_psql”

4. Start Django App

• In VisualStudio Code terminal, you’ve to point to the project directory using “cd” command

cd django_psql

• Run the following command to start your first app.

python manage.py startapp testdb

After complete building the app, then you can write your desired table that you should previously design e.g. which types of data you want to store in your database.

• Run the server to make sure that everything is okay

python manage.py runserver

python manage.py is the command that’s used to run Django, so you will use it many times a long with your project

5. Setting up a database server I assume you already download PostgreSQL, if don’t, the following is the link to download → PostgreSQL Downloads

6. Get back to our code to config the database

• Navigate to settings.py
• Approximately, in line 76 of code, this is the database config part

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': BASE_DIR / 'db.sqlite3',
    }
}

By default, the sqlite database is used. we will change this config for psql.

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
        'NAME': 'your_db_name', 
        'USER': 'postgres',
        'PASSWORD': 'your_db_password',
        'HOST': '127.0.0.1', 
        'PORT': '5432',
    }
}

• Remember: Don’t keep sensitive data in the setting file, instead, use the environment variable AKA .env file.

7. Create a Table Get back to app in testdb/models.py

• Create a table by writing a class/object(ORM) to access the database instead of writing raw SQL (Django automatically converts Python class/object code to be raw SQL under the hood.

This is just a simple table for testing

from django.db import models

class User(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=80)
    age = models.IntegerField()

8. Migrate the table to the PostgreSQL database Now, we have successfully written our table but it isn’t being sent to PostgreSQL yet. So what I would do are the following steps

• makemigrations → To update and see the history or transaction happened in our table (We have to run this command every time when something changes in models.py e.g. adding a new table, changing a field name, etc
• migrate → The last step to submit or sent out our table into the database server

Now it’s time to run “makemigrations” command

python manage.py makemigrations

I got this error “No changes detected” because I didn’t register my app.

• Go to settings.py to register the app

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'testdb',
    ...
]

• No problem with the app, but I got new error “No module named psycog2”

For macOS if you can’t install or the above command doesn’t work, use the following command instead, just add — binary

pip install psycopg2

Now everything is okay, so I can run “makemigrations” again

python manage.py makemigrations

The last step is running “migrate”

python manage.py migrate

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.

License

MIT