Problems with the django tutorial. Is there a github repo for it?

Using Django Getting Started
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I’m an experienced python developer but have never developed a django app so I’m going over the tutorial here Writing your first Django app, part 1 | Django documentation | Django

Maybe there’s a better tutorial out there someone can recommend?

At the risk of looking like an idiot, I’ve found some issues and have questions I could use some help on:

  1. Is there a github repository of the working tutorial project? There is no indication of a github repository I can download or look at to see a working example of it at any step of the way. As I follow the tutorial there are steps along the way where the app is completely broken and nothing to compare against to see where i want wrong. I went off the rails on tutorial part 3.
  2. The tutorial doesn’t show example urls along the way to demonstrate how what we just did should be invoked on a browser. This is frustrating as it progresses building views and templates but as a noob, I’m not sure what the url path should be to test it and it doesn’t address that.

thanks for any help and suggestions.

1 Like
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  1. I’m not aware of any, no. (And if there was one, I’d recommend against using it. Finding mistakes being made is part of the learning process. That’s also why I strongly recommend people type the code and examples, and not copy/paste from the page.)

  2. Actually, the tutorial does do that, when you get to each point with something functional.
    On page one, in the section “Write your first view”, there a part where it tells you to run runserver. Immediately underneath that is the url to enter in your browser.

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Thanks for the reply.
Regarding question 2 and your reply, yes, on the first page it does show the url for the example you pointed out, but as the tutorial progresses, it does not. Take a look at parts 3 and 4 for example.
I’ll figure it out, but in my experience, it’s good to have full urls along the way to verify. Yes, I can construct them, with experience.

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Part 3 - Writing more views:

Take a look in your browser, at “/polls/34/”. It’ll run the detail() function and display whatever ID you provide in the URL. Try “/polls/34/results/” and “/polls/34/vote/” too – these will display the placeholder results and voting pages.

Part 3 - Write views that actually do something:

Load the page by pointing your browser at “/polls/”, and you should see a bulleted-list containing the “What’s up” question from Tutorial 2. The link points to the question’s detail page.

The rest of part 3 doesn’t produce anything new to see.

Part 4 - Write a minimal form:

Now, go to /polls/1/ in your browser and vote in the question.

And that pretty much covers all the urls you’ll be creating in the tutorial. At the very end of that page:

Run the server, and use your new polling app based on generic views.

So the point is, in most cases, you’re not entering URLs. You’re starting your project and going to a home page. That home page provides links to the other pages. Navigation beyond that point is all managed by those links.

I’m not sure what you think is missing here.

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No offence Ed, but being an “experienced python developer” doesn’t mean you should be able to pick up Django in a few days. Being an experienced web developer does. I picked up Django in less than a week (the quality of the source code helped quite a bit), because I was very familiar with most concepts. I started my web dev career with php and “require_once(‘app_top.php’)” in terms of frameworks.

There is a very close to 100% chance you know more about python that I will ever do, but when it comes to web development, you should stay a while and listen (if you ever played Diablo 2). The tutorial is not meant to teach web dev (and how http works, you know, the basics of webdev), but to teach how to use django in a web dev environment.