Start new Django project from scratch

First step is to create a virtual environment to install all needed libraries.

Python3 incorporates a virtual environment (venv) maker. To create a venv with python3 we need to run:

python3 -m venv my-virual-environment

Or something more realistic:

python3 -m venv venv

Then, we need activate the virtual env to install Django so we can use the django-admin tool to create the project.

source venv/bin/activate

Now, we can install Django

python3 -m pip install Django

We need to run the following command to create the project.

django-admin startproject mysite

This command is going to create a folder (next to venv) with the minimal Django files to work. We may want to deactivate the venv and move it inside the new project directory.

# Deacivate venv
deactivate

# Move venv to project directory
mv venv mysite

Now we can enter into the project directory and re-activate the venv

# Enter into the project directory
cd mysite

# Re-activate venv
source venv/bin/activate

Then we need to run the migrations and collect static files before to run the app itself

python3 manage.py migrate

To collect static files we need to add a couple of configurations to the file settings.py under “mysite” folder.

# settings.py
import os
...
...
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'media')
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'

Now, we can run the command to collect static files.

python3 manage.py collectstatic

Finally, we can run our Django project.

python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

If we did it right, we should see something like this in the browser.