coac

Castle on a Cloud. play chess with two physical boards with placement sensors and a wifi connection. Powered by Django.

Testing on your computer

This is a Django site. To test this project we need to serve it up locally on our own machine. Simply type this line into the terminal:
python manage.py runserver

You have to make sure that you have all of the appropriate python packages installed. These should be in `requirements.txt`

So what does manage.py do? This script does two things.

1. sets the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to point to our project settings as spec'd out in settings.py
2. runs the function execute_from_command_line from django.core.managemet which does some impressive magic and serves up the site locally.

(TODO: replace "impressive magic" with some basics about execute_from_command_line)

servin' it up

Now we can find our website being served at this url: http://127.0.0.1:8000. But how do we navigate around our website?...

URLs

Well, a website is a connected collection of web addresses. These web addresses are known as URLs(stands for: Un-Ripe Legumes). If we know the what the list of each possible URL in our website looks like, then we essentially know what the entire website consists of! Lucky for us, a Django project should have a file called urls.py with a list of all possible URLs in our website called url_patterns.

To repeat, in urls.py we create a list called url_patterns. This is where we can see all the valid URLs for our site. How are the urls stored in this list? We'll start with an example of one and break it down piece by piece.

An Example URL (i.e. an element of the url_patterns list): url(r'^board/$', views.board, name='board')

We can see that there's a function called url with 3 arguments:

1. The first arg is the url itself. Notice that it is a regular expression¹ as opposed to a static string, so it can actually represent many different url strings.
2. The second element is a view. A view is an object in Django. It's what actually gets shown on the web site when a user goes to the url. #TODO
3. The name. I don't know what the hell is the purpose of the name. I'll remember later. (I think it makes it easier to reference in other python files in the project)

So, about this view concept. How exactly does it display web pages?

Views

The view is ACTIVATED when we go to the web address of a url. The view must follow this formula

this_is_a_view(request)
    do stuff
    return HttpResponse(template.render(context, request))

and what the site displays (i.e. the "view") when we go to each URL (i.e. when we type the URL in the address bar). Each URL points to a "view" (these are defined in views.py)

Footnotes

1. For more information on regular expressions, go to google and type in "regular expressions" in the search bar. You lazy nincompoop. ↩