Installing Django on Ubuntu 14

Introduction

Django is a full-featured web development framework written in Python and is widely used for creating dynamic web applications.
This tutorial will cover the process of installing Django on Ubuntu 14 using the official system repository.

Perquisites

• A Vultr instance running Ubuntu 14.04 x64
• This tutorial

The process

Installing Django

The process for installing Django from the Ubuntu repositories is pretty straight forward and requires two commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-django

You can also install Django using pip:

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install python-pip

Useful commands

Checking the currently installed Django version:

django-admin --version

Upgrading Django via pip:

sudo pip install django --upgrade

Creating a project

Use the django-admin command to create a new project

django-admin startproject projectalpha
cd projectalpha

The above command will create a new project with the name projectalpha with the current active directory. e.g: if your current directory is /, then your project location will be /projectalpha .

The next step is to bootstrap a database.:

python manage.py migrate

Create the administrator credentials for the project:

python manage.py createsuperuser

The above command will prompt you to enter the administrator account’s username, password, and email address.

Starting the project:

python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080

You will then be able to view your project by visiting your server’s IP address followed by :8080 in your web browser. e.g http://192.168.1.100:8080

Note: you can use any port you like, even port 80 if you do not have Apache/Nginx installed and running on your server.

Just like Apache/Nginx, you would see a message in your browser indicating that the Django app is working:

It worked!
Congratulations on your first Django-powered page.

And to access the administrator panel of your application, append /admin to the end of your URL to reach the login page. e.g: http://192.168.1.100:8080/admin/. Once you have entered the admin username and password, you will be able to view the admin panel which allows you to manage all different aspects of your project.

Once you are finished working and looking through the default app site, you can stop the development server by typing CTRL-C in your terminal to immediately stop the project. However, your data will remain in tact.

Please make sure to check out the Django documentation for more information on how to build your applications and customize your app sites.

This concludes our tutorial. Thank you for reading.