Django Base Site

Overview

The Django Base Site is an opinionated starter template designed to quickly start new Django projects. It has been maintained for over twelve years and has been used as a foundation for many other projects. This template helps teams stay organized and collaborate effectively as the project grows. By incorporating best practices and tools, it saves time on setup and tooling. With the Django Base Site, you can deploy your site to production in minutes instead of days.

Features

• Best Practices: The Django Base Site follows best practices and includes tools such as Environs for managing environment variables, Docker Compose for development, and a multi-stage Dockerfile for production-ready Docker image setup. It also utilizes Pip Tools for maintaining Python requirements and Just for running common commands.
• Django Packages: This starter template includes popular Django packages like Django 5, Celery for running asynchronous tasks, a custom user model for easy extension, Django Allauth for authentication workflows, Django Crispy Forms for working with Django forms, Django Alive for health checks, and Django Maintenance Mode for maintenance mode functionality.
• Python Testing Tools: The Django Base Site incorporates essential Python testing tools such as Pytest as the test runner, Pytest Django plugin for Django-specific testing, Pytest-cov for code coverage, Model Bakery for faster creation of model instances for tests, and Django Test Plus for helper functions to write tests faster.
• Code Quality, Formatting, and Linting Tools: To ensure code quality, the template includes tools like Black for automatic Python code formatting, Ruff for extra linting written in Rust, Mypy for Python type checking, dj Lint for Django HTML template formatting and linting, Django Debug Toolbar for debugging and optimizing Django queries, Bandit for automated security checking, Stylelint for Sass formatting and linting, and Eslint for automatic JavaScript formatting and linting.
• Frontend: The Django Base Site includes Bootstrap 5, a popular UI framework, and Vite, a fast frontend build tool.
• Documentation: The template uses MkDocs for documentation and includes plugins like MkDocs Material for a beautiful theme, mkdocstrings for building documentation from Python docstrings, mkdocs-include-markdown-plugin to include docs from other files, and mkdocs-linkcheck for automatic link checking.

Installation

Before proceeding with the installation, ensure that you have Docker and Just installed on your system. Docker with Docker Compose is used for local development, and Just is used for common project commands.

Here is a quickstart guide for installation:

1. Clone the Django Base Site repository from GitHub.
2. Install the required dependencies by running the command just setup.
3. Start the development server using the command just dev.
4. Access the application in your browser at localhost:8000.

For more detailed installation instructions, refer to the documentation provided.

Summary

The Django Base Site is a powerful starter template for Django projects that incorporates best practices, essential packages, testing tools, and code quality tools. It provides a smooth development experience and helps teams collaborate effectively. With the included frontend tools and documentation plugins, it allows for efficient frontend development and comprehensive project documentation. Installing the template is easy with Docker and Just, and it enables quick deployment to production. Overall, the Django Base Site is a valuable resource for starting Django projects and accelerating development timelines.