Django 5 By Example: Build powerful and reliable Python web applications from scratch. 5 Ed

Cover....1

Copyright....3

Foreword....5

Contributors....7

Table of Contents....12

Preface....26

Chapter 1: Building a Blog Application....34

Installing Python....35

Creating a Python virtual environment....36

Installing Django....37

Installing Django with pip....37

Django overview....37

Main framework components....38

The Django architecture....38

New features in Django 5....39

Creating your first project....40

Applying initial database migrations....42

Running the development server....43

Project settings....44

Projects and applications....45

Creating an application....46

Creating the blog data models....46

Creating the Post model....47

Adding datetime fields....48

Defining a default sort order....50

Adding a database index....51

Activating the application....52

Adding a status field....52

Adding a many-to-one relationship....55

Creating and applying migrations....56

Creating an administration site for models....59

Creating a superuser....59

The Django administration site....59

Adding models to the administration site....61

Customizing how models are displayed....63

Adding facet counts to filters....65

Working with QuerySets and managers....66

Creating objects....67

Updating objects....68

Retrieving objects....68

Filtering objects....68

Using field lookups....69

Chaining filters....71

Excluding objects....71

Ordering objects....71

Limiting QuerySets....72

Counting objects....72

Checking if an object exists....72

Deleting objects....72

Complex lookups with Q objects....73

When QuerySets are evaluated....73

More on QuerySets....73

Creating model managers....74

Building list and detail views....75

Creating list and detail views ....75

Using the get_object_or_404 shortcut....76

Adding URL patterns for your views....77

Creating templates for your views....79

Creating a base template....79

Creating the post list template....80

Accessing our application....81

Creating the post detail template....82

The request/response cycle....83

Management commands used in this chapter....84

Summary....85

Additional resources....85

Chapter 2: Enhancing Your Blog and Adding Social Features....88

Functional overview....89

Using canonical URLs for models....89

Creating SEO-friendly URLs for posts....92

Modifying the URL patterns....93

Modifying the views....94

Modifying the canonical URL for posts....94

Adding pagination....95

Adding pagination to the post list view....96

Creating a pagination template....96

Handling pagination errors....99

Building class-based views....102

Why use class-based views....103

Using a class-based view to list posts....103

Recommending posts by email....105

Creating forms with Django....106

Handling forms in views....107

Sending emails with Django....109

Working with environment variables....109

Sending emails in views....113

Rendering forms in templates....115

Creating a comment system....119

Creating a model for comments....119

Adding comments to the administration site....121

Creating forms from models....122

Handling ModelForms in views....123

Creating templates for the comment form....125

Adding comments to the post detail view....127

Adding comments to the post detail template....128

Using simplified templates for form rendering....135

Summary....136

Additional resources....137

Chapter 3: Extending Your Blog Application....138

Functional overview....139

Implementing tagging with django-taggit....140

Retrieving posts by similarity....149

Creating custom template tags and filters....155

Implementing custom template tags....156

Creating a simple template tag....156

Creating an inclusion template tag....158

Creating a template tag that returns a QuerySet....160

Implementing custom template filters....162

Creating a template filter to support Markdown syntax....162

Adding a sitemap to the site....167

Creating feeds for blog posts....172

Adding full-text search to the blog....179

Installing Docker....180

Installing PostgreSQL....180

Dumping the existing data....181

Switching the database in the project....182

Loading the data into the new database....184

Simple search lookups....185

Searching against multiple fields....185

Building a search view....186

Stemming and ranking results....189

Stemming and removing stop words in different languages....191

Weighting queries....192

Searching with trigram similarity....193

Summary....195

Expanding your project using AI....195

Additional resources....196

Chapter 4: Building a Social Website....198

Functional overview....199

Creating a social website project....200

Starting the social website project....200

Using the Django authentication framework....201

Creating a login view....202

Using Django’s built-in authentication views....208

Login and logout views....209

Change password views....215

Reset password views....218

User registration and user profiles....226

User registration....227

Extending the user model....234

Installing Pillow and serving media files....235

Creating migrations for the profile model....236

Using a custom user model....242

Summary....242

Additional resources....243

Chapter 5: Implementing Social Authentication....244

Functional overview....245

Technical requirements....245

Using the messages framework....245

Building a custom authentication backend....249

Preventing users from using an existing email address....251

Adding social authentication to your site....253

Running the development server through HTTPS....255

Authentication using Google....258

Creating a profile for users that register with social authentication....266

Summary....268

Additional resources....268

Chapter 6: Sharing Content on Your Website....270

Functional overview....271

Creating an image bookmarking website....271

Building the image model....272

Creating many-to-many relationships....274

Registering the image model in the administration site....275

Posting content from other websites....276

Cleaning form fields....276

Installing the Requests library....277

Overriding the save() method of a ModelForm....277

Building a bookmarklet with JavaScript....282

Creating a detail view for images....295

Creating image thumbnails using easy-thumbnails....297

Adding asynchronous actions with JavaScript....300

Loading JavaScript on the DOM....302

Cross-site request forgery for HTTP requests in JavaScript....303

Performing HTTP requests with JavaScript....304

Adding infinite scroll pagination to the image list....310

Summary....317

Additional resources....317

Chapter 7: Tracking User Actions....318

Functional overview....319

Building a follow system....320

Creating many-to-many relationships with an intermediate model....320

Creating list and detail views for user profiles....323

Adding user follow/unfollow actions with JavaScript....329

Creating an activity stream application....332

Using the contenttypes framework....333

Adding generic relations to your models....334

Avoiding duplicate actions in the activity stream....338

Adding user actions to the activity stream....339

Displaying the activity stream....342

Optimizing QuerySets that involve related objects....343

Using select_related()....343

Using prefetch_related()....344

Creating templates for actions....345

Using signals for denormalizing counts....348

Working with signals....348

Application configuration classes....350

Using Django Debug Toolbar....352

Installing Django Debug Toolbar....353

Django Debug Toolbar panels....356

Django Debug Toolbar commands....359

Counting image views with Redis....360

Installing Redis....360

Using Redis with Python....362

Storing image views in Redis....363

Storing a ranking in Redis....365

Next steps with Redis....368

Summary....369

Expanding your project using AI....369

Additional resources....370

Chapter 8: Building an Online Shop....372

Functional overview....373

Creating an online shop project....374

Creating product catalog models....375

Registering catalog models on the administration site....379

Building catalog views....381

Creating catalog templates....384

Building a shopping cart....389

Using Django sessions....389

Session settings....390

Session expiration....391

Storing shopping carts in sessions....391

Creating shopping cart views....395

Adding items to the cart....395

Building a template to display the cart....398

Adding products to the cart....400

Updating product quantities in the cart....402

Creating a context processor for the current cart....403

Context processors....403

Setting the cart in the request context....404

Registering customer orders....406

Creating order models....407

Including order models in the administration site....409

Creating customer orders....410

Creating asynchronous tasks....416

Working with asynchronous tasks....417

Workers, message queues, and message brokers....417

Using Django with Celery and RabbitMQ....418

Monitoring Celery with Flower....425

Summary....427

Additional resources....427

Chapter 9: Managing Payments and Orders....430

Functional overview....431

Integrating a payment gateway....432

Creating a Stripe account....432

Installing the Stripe Python library....435

Adding Stripe to your project....436

Building the payment process....437

Integrating Stripe Checkout....439

Testing the checkout process....447

Using test credit cards....449

Checking the payment information in the Stripe dashboard....452

Using webhooks to receive payment notifications....455

Creating a webhook endpoint....455

Testing webhook notifications....460

Referencing Stripe payments in orders....463

Going live....467

Exporting orders to CSV files....467

Adding custom actions to the administration site....468

Extending the administration site with custom views....471

Generating PDF invoices dynamically....476

Installing WeasyPrint....477

Creating a PDF template....477

Rendering PDF files....478

Sending PDF files by email....483

Summary....486

Additional resources....486

Chapter 10: Extending Your Shop....488

Functional overview....489

Creating a coupon system....490

Building the coupon model....490

Applying a coupon to the shopping cart....494

Applying coupons to orders....502

Creating coupons for Stripe Checkout....507

Adding coupons to orders on the administration site and to PDF invoices....510

Building a recommendation engine....513

Recommending products based on previous purchases....513

Summary....525

Additional resources....525

Chapter 11: Adding Internationalization to Your Shop....526

Functional overview....527

Internationalization with Django....528

Internationalization and localization settings....528

Internationalization management commands....529

Installing the gettext toolkit....529

How to add translations to a Django project....529

How Django determines the current language....530

Preparing your project for internationalization....530

Translating Python code....532

Standard translations....532

Lazy translations....532

Translations including variables....533

Plural forms in translations....533

Translating your own code....534

Translating templates....538

The {% translate %} template tag....538

The {% blocktranslate %} template tag....538

Translating the shop templates....539

Using the Rosetta translation interface....542

Fuzzy translations....546

URL patterns for internationalization....546

Adding a language prefix to URL patterns....546

Translating URL patterns....547

Allowing users to switch language....552

Translating models with django-parler....553

Installing django-parler....554

Translating model fields....554

Integrating translations into the administration site....557

Creating migrations for model translations....558

Using translations in QuerySets....561

Adapting views for translations....561

Format localization....564

Using django-localflavor to validate form fields....565

Expanding your project using AI....567

Summary....567

Additional resources....568

Chapter 12: Building an E-Learning Platform....570

Functional overview....570

Setting up the e-learning project....571

Serving media files....572

Building the course models....573

Registering the models in the administration site....575

Using fixtures to provide initial data for models....576

Creating models for polymorphic content....579

Using model inheritance....580

Abstract models....580

Multi-table model inheritance....581

Proxy models....582

Creating the Content models....584

Creating custom model fields....587

Adding ordering to Module and Content objects....589

Adding authentication views....593

Adding an authentication system....594

Creating the authentication templates....594

Summary....598

Additional resources....598

Chapter 13: Creating a Content Management System....600

Functional overview....601

Creating a CMS....602

Creating class-based views....602

Using mixins for class-based views....603

Working with groups and permissions....605

Restricting access to class-based views....607

Managing course modules and their contents....614

Using formsets for course modules....614

Adding content to course modules....619

Managing modules and their contents....624

Reordering modules and their contents....629

Using mixins from django-braces....630

Summary....638

Additional resources....639

Chapter 14: Rendering and Caching Content....640

Functional overview....641

Displaying the catalog of courses....642

Adding student registration....647

Creating a student registration view....648

Enrolling in courses....651

Rendering course contents....654

Accessing course contents....654

Rendering different types of content....658

Using the cache framework....661

Available cache backends....661

Installing Memcached....662

Installing the Memcached Docker image....662

Installing the Memcached Python binding....662

Django cache settings....662

Adding Memcached to your project....663

Cache levels....663

Using the low-level cache API....664

Checking cache requests with Django Debug Toolbar....666

Low-level caching based on dynamic data....669

Caching template fragments....670

Caching views....671

Using the per-site cache....672

Using the Redis cache backend....673

Monitoring Redis with Django Redisboard....674

Summary....675

Additional resources....675

Chapter 15: Building an API....678

Functional overview....679

Building a RESTful API....680

Installing Django REST framework....680

Defining serializers....681

Understanding parsers and renderers....682

Building list and detail views....683

Consuming the API....685

Extending serializers....687

Adding additional fields to serializers....687

Implementing serializer method fields....689

Adding pagination to views....690

Building the course serializer....693

Serializing relations....693

Creating nested serializers....694

Creating ViewSets and routers....695

Building custom API views....699

Handling authentication....700

Implementing basic authentication....701

Adding permissions to views....701

Adding additional actions to ViewSets....703

Creating custom permissions....704

Serializing course contents....704

Consuming the RESTful API....707

Summary....710

Additional resources....710

Chapter 16: Building a Chat Server....712

Functional overview....713

Creating a chat application....713

Implementing the chat room view....714

Real-time Django with Channels....717

Asynchronous applications using ASGI....718

The request/response cycle using Channels....719

Installing Channels and Daphne....721

Writing a consumer....723

Routing....724

Implementing the WebSocket client....726

Enabling a channel layer....732

Channels and groups....733

Setting up a channel layer with Redis....733

Updating the consumer to broadcast messages....734

Adding context to the messages....738

Modifying the consumer to be fully asynchronous....742

Persisting messages into the database....744

Creating a model for chat messages....744

Adding the message model to the administration site....746

Storing messages in the database....746

Displaying the chat history....749

Integrating the chat application with existing views....751

Summary....752

Additional resources....752

Chapter 17: Going Live....754

Creating a production environment....755

Managing settings for multiple environments....755

Local environment settings....756

Running the local environment....756

Production environment settings....757

Using Docker Compose....758

Installing Docker Compose via Docker Desktop....758

Creating a Dockerfile....759

Adding the Python requirements....760

Creating a Docker Compose file....761

Configuring the PostgreSQL service....764

Applying database migrations and creating a superuser....767

Configuring the Redis service....767

Serving Django through WSGI and NGINX....769

Using uWSGI....769

Configuring uWSGI....770

Using NGINX....771

Configuring NGINX....772

Using a hostname....775

Serving static and media assets....775

Collecting static files....775

Serving static files with NGINX....776

Securing your site with SSL/TLS....778

Checking your project for production....778

Configuring your Django project for SSL/TLS....779

Creating an SSL/TLS certificate....780

Configuring NGINX to use SSL/TLS....780

Redirecting HTTP traffic over to HTTPS....782

Configuring Daphne for Django Channels....783

Using secure connections for WebSockets....785

Including Daphne in the NGINX configuration....785

Creating a custom middleware....788

Creating subdomain middleware....791

Serving multiple subdomains with NGINX....793

Implementing custom management commands....793

Summary....796

Expanding your project using AI....796

Additional resources....797

Packt Page....800

Other Books You May Enjoy....802

Index....806

2025 EDITION: Build four fully functional real-world Django applications with authentication, content management systems, payment processing, REST APIs, and more!

Free with your book: DRM-free PDF version + access to Packt's next-gen Reader*

Key Features

• Updated with the latest Django 5.2 features, detailed app planning, improved tooling, and GPT prompts for extending projects
• Learn Django essentials, including models, ORM, views, templates, URLs, forms, authentication, signals, and middleware
• Integrate JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, Docker, and Memcached into your applications

Book Description

If you want to learn Django by doing, this book is for you.

This 2025 EDITION, fully updated to Django 5.2 LTS, is the fifth edition of the best-selling Django By Example franchise that helps you build real-world web apps. This book will walk you through planning and creation, solving common problems, and implementing best practices using a step-by-step approach.

You’ll cover a wide range of web application development topics through four different projects: a blog application, a social website, an e-commerce application, and an e-learning platform. Pick up what’s new in Django 5 as you build end-to-end Python web apps, follow detailed project plans, and understand the hows and whys of Django.

This is a practical and approachable book that will have you creating web apps quickly.

*Email sign-up and proof of purchase required

What you will learn

• Use various Django modules to solve specific problems using the latest features
• Integrate third-party Django applications into your project
• Build complex web applications using Redis, Postgres, Celery/RabbitMQ and Memcached
• Set up a production environment for your project with Docker Compose
• Build a RESTful API with Django Rest Framework (DRF)
• Implement advanced functionalities, such as full-text search engines, user activity streams, payment gateways, and recommender engines
• Build real-time asynchronous (ASGI) apps with Django Channels and WebSockets

Who this book is for

This book is for readers with basic Python programming knowledge and programmers transitioning from other web frameworks who wish to learn Django by doing. If you already use Django, or have in the past, and want to learn best practices and integrate other technologies to scale your applications, then this book is for you too. This book will help you master the most relevant areas of the framework by building practical projects from scratch.

Some previous knowledge of HTML and JavaScript is assumed.