Tutorial

The dja_skel application provides an stand alone script named dja_skel and a django management command named skel. The former is useful when you want to instantiate an skeleton that does not operate on an existing project, the so called non-project skeletons (an skeleton that bootstraps a django project btw), while the latter requires at least a working project to operate (a project in which dja_skel appears in INSTALLED_APPS so that manage.py knows about the skel command).

Creating a sample application

The skel management command works on django applications, so first at all we need a project and an application. skel does some assumptions on the source layout and content. For now we will bootstrap a project using the dja_skel script and an application with the skel management command. The section Adapting existing code explains how to prepare existing code in order to play nicely with skel.

$ source ~/virtualenvs/dja_skel/bin/activate
(dja_skel)$ cd ~/projects
(dja_skel)$ mkdir testing_dja_skel
(dja_skel)$ cd testing_dja_skel
# replace project14 with project13 if you're using django < 1.4
(dja_skel)$ dja_skel -i -t project14 prjname=myproject
# if running django < 1 .4
(dja_skel)$ cd project
# end if
(dja_skel)$ ./manage.py skel -i -t app appname=myapp

That’s all. This will create a django project (using the template project14) and an application called myapp . The project is configured with sensible defaults so that we can start working with it right now. The section default_skeletons contains a detailed descriptions of the application and project skeletons.

Next we need a model to play with. We’ll use the skel management command to bootstrap a simple model:

(dja_skel)$ ./manage.py skel -i -t model applabel= myapp ModelName=MyModel

This command will create an almost empty MyModel model in the myapp application. The model definition is located in the myapp/models/my_model.py module:

class MyModel(models.Model):
   """MyModel
   """

   # put here your field definitions

   class Meta:
       app_label = "myapp"
       db_table = "myapp_my_model"
       permissions = (("read_mymodel", "Can read MyModel"), )
       verbose_name = "My model"
       verbose_name_plural = "My models"

This command performs other operation:

• adds permission definitions for the CRUD operations into the permissions.py module.
• creates and empty MyModelAdmin model admin class and registers it with the admin.

Add a couple of fields so that it looks like:

class MyModel(models.Model):
   name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
   age = models.IntegerField()
   class Meta:
       app_label = "myapp"
       db_table = "myapp_my_model"
       permissions = (("read_mymodel", "Can read MyModel"), )
       verbose_name = "My model"
       verbose_name_plural = "My models"

And execute syncdb as usual.

(dja_skel)$ ./manage.py syncdb

As a final step we will create a (class based) view to list the MyModel models.

(dja_skel)$ ./manage.py skel myapp -i -t list_view ModelName=MyModel

This command performs a lot of work under the hood:

• creates a view in the views package, in the module my_model_list_view.py
• creates the template templates/myapp/my_model_list_views.html
• adds an from views.my_model_list_view import my_model_list_view to views/__init__.py.
• adds the url my_model/list to the urls.py.

Add a couple of MyModel in the admin and visit http://localhost:8000/myapp/my_model/list.