12 tips on Django Best Practices

David Arcos
catchoom.com | @catchoom
 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Some (personal) suggestions on:

- Development

- Deployment

- External tools

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices
Hi! I'm David Arcos

- Python/Django developer
- discovered Django in 2007 (v0.96)
- professionally since 2008

- Web backend, distributed systems,

databases, scalability, security

- Team leader at Catchoom

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

- Image Recognition SaaS

- Top recognition results, shortest response times

- Easy to integrate into your apps/services

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Why Python? PEP 20, The Zen of Python:

- “Beautiful is better than ugly”
- “Simple is better than complex”
- “Complex is better than complicated”
- “Readability counts”
- “Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules”
- “If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea”
- (…)
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Why Django?
- "The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines"

- Django design philosophy:

- loose coupling, less code, DRY, consistency, etc...
- https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/misc/design-philosophies/

- technically: tons of django apps, very good doc

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Virtualenv:
- “one project, one virtualenv”

- projects with different dependencies, package versions

- easier to deploy. Forget dependency hell!

- virtualenvwrapper is a convenient tool

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Dependencies:
- use pip:

pip install catchoom

- save the dependencies in a requirements.txt file:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

pip install -r requirements.txt

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Layout: projects and apps

- project = the full website. app = python library

repository/
|-- doc
`-- project
|-- apps
| |-- app1
| |-- app2
| `-- app3
`-- settings

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

- use short, obvious, single-word names for your apps

- many small apps is better than a few giant apps:

- explain an app in a sentence. If you can't, split the app
- rather than expand an app, write a new app

- don't reinvent the wheel!

- django.contrib
- 3rd-party apps
David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com
 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Settings:
- multiple settings files:
- per environment: dev, testing, staging, production
- per developer (local settings, use the hostname)

- all settings files must inherit from base, so you can do:

INSTALLED_APPS += ('debug_toolbar', )

- version control all the settings!

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com
 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Django is a MTV framework

- Model (app/models.py)

- Template (app/templates/*.html)

- View (app/views.py)

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Fat models, thin views...

- logic should go to the models (and forms, signals...)

- keep the views at a minimum

Good example: django.contrib.auth.models.User

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

- why? Because of maintainability!

- a model is much easier to test

- reusable logic: form validation, signals, etc

- the code becomes clearer, more self-documenting

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

...and stupid templates!

- your template layer should be as thin as possible

- (by design) django templates are limited, constrained

- doesn't fit your use case? Use jinja2 in those views

- Hey, but I get ugly generated HTML!

- doesn't matter, you want maintainable templates

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Deployment:
- web server:

- Nginx + gunicorn
- Supervisord to keep it alive.

- static server:

- Nginx. Or any CDN.

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Fabric:
"a library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for
application deployment or systems administration tasks"

- to automate deployments, migrations, execute

management commands, monitoring...

- no more repetitive maintainance tasks done manually!

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

South:
"intelligent schema and data migrations for Django projects"

- creates migration files automatically.

- You can still do changes

- can do backward migrations

- will avoid disasters. Use it!

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Celery:
"asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing"

- execute tasks asynchronously, in a pool workers

- cpu-intensive or I/O-intensive tasks:

- emails, pdfs, thumbnails, crawling, requests...

- Celery needs a Message Queue

- Instead of RabbitMQ, try Redis.
David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com
 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Redis:
"An advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure
server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets."

- store ephemeral data (active sessions)

- general cache (memcached compatible)
- real-time calculations: stats, monitoring, throttling...
- messages: channels (pub-sub), lists (push/blpop)
- indexes/filters (“sort by hits”)

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Sentry:
"realtime event logging and aggregation platform"

- monitor errors, get all the info to do a post-mortem

- uses the Python logger, easy to configure

- deploy a Sentry instance

- or use getsentry.com

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Debugging:
- ipython (already in ./manage.py shell)

- ipdb
import ipdb
ipdb.set_trace()

- django-debug-toolbar
- very powerful
- use it to optimize db performance, view by view
David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com
 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Summary:
- follow the Django philosophy (when possible)

- stand on the shoulder of giants: use existing apps

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Thanks for attending!

- http://slideshare.net/DZPM

- Questions?

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com

Questions? catchoom.com | @catchoom
 12 tips on Django Best Practices

Thanks for attending!

- http://slideshare.net/DZPM

David Arcos | @DZPM Catchoom | http://catchoom.com