Scaffolding a Django Project and App

Before diving deep into the theory behind Django paradigms and HTTP requests, we'll show you how easy it is to get a Django project up and running. After this first section and exercise, you will have created a Django project, made a request to it with your browser, and seen the response.

A Django project is a directory that contains all the data for your project: code, settings, templates, and assets. It is created and scaffolded by running the django-admin.py command on the command line with the startproject argument and providing the project name. For example, to create a Django project with the name myproject, the command that is run is this:

django-admin.py startproject myproject

This will create the myproject directory, which Django populates with the necessary files to run the project. Inside the myproject directory are two files (shown in Figure 1.1):

Figure 1.1: Project directory for myproject

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