A Django Project and App

Projects contain apps

A Django project holds settings, root URLs and the ASGI/WSGI entry points; apps are reusable components (catalog, orders, accounts), each with models, views, tests and migrations. Create them with django-admin startproject and python manage.py startapp, then add the app to INSTALLED_APPS. manage.py runs commands: runserver, makemigrations, migrate, shell, test, createsuperuser.

Creating the demo project, run

I ran this with Django 6.1.1 and Python 3.12 in a demo project (shopsite with a catalog app) using SQLite. The generated files: a shopsite project package (settings, urls, asgi, wsgi) and a catalog app (models, views, admin, apps, tests), plus manage.py.

django-admin startproject shopsite .
python manage.py startapp catalog
find . -name "*.py" | sort

Output:

./catalog/admin.py
./catalog/apps.py
./catalog/__init__.py
./catalog/models.py
./catalog/tests.py
./catalog/views.py
./manage.py
./shopsite/asgi.py
./shopsite/__init__.py
./shopsite/settings.py
./shopsite/urls.py
./shopsite/wsgi.py

Split settings per environment

Read secrets and environment-specific values from environment variables rather than editing settings.py per server.

Quick check: What must you do after startapp for Django to use the app?

• Add it to INSTALLED_APPS
• Restart the computer
• Rename manage.py
• Nothing