Django for a Rails Developer

This is not yet another Django vs Rails blog post. It is a compilation of notes I made working with Django after having worked on Rails for years.

In this post I want to give a brief introduction to Django project layout from a Rails developer point of view, on what is there, what is not there and where to look for things. It should help a rails developer working on django be able to find the necessary files and underatnd the layout of the project files.

Once you have both the frameworks installed on your system you can create the projects using the commands

# creating a rails project
rails rails_project
# creating a Django project
django-admin.py startproject django_project

Lets look at the files and structure created by the respective frameworks

#rails_project
README
Rakefile
app/
    controllers/
        application_controller.rb
    helpers/
        application_helper.rb
    models/
    views/
        layouts/
config/
    boot.rb
    database.yml
    environment.rb
    environments/
        development.rb
        production.rb
        test.rb
    initializers/
        backtrace_silencers.rb
        inflections.rb
        mime_types.rb
        new_rails_defaults.rb
        session_store.rb
    locales/
        en.yml
    routes.rb
db/
    seeds.rb
doc/
    README_FOR_APP
lib/
    tasks/
log/
    development.log
    production.log
    server.log
    test.log
public/
    404.html
    422.html
    500.html
    favicon.ico
    images/
        rails.png
    index.html
    javascripts/
        application.js
        controls.js
        dragdrop.js
        effects.js
        prototype.js
    robots.txt
    stylesheets/
script/
    about
    console
    dbconsole
    destroy
    generate
    performance/
        benchmarker
        profiler
    plugin
    runner
    server
test/
    fixtures/
    functional/
    integration/
    performance/
        browsing_test.rb
    test_helper.rb
    unit/
tmp/
    cache/
    pids/
    sessions/
    sockets/
vendor/
    plugins/

that is huge….

lets look at the django project files

# django_project
__init__.py
manage.py
settings.py
urls.py

far lesser when compared to the rails project.

In fact a rails project comes with everything a web application needs. When I say everything I mean everything….. base application, routing, database configuration, development, test and production environment specific configurations and their respective log files, javascript, test, some standard html files and some helpful scripts for developing.

Why then does a Django project have so less number of files? It has got to do with the Django’s philosophy and the concept of applications. The django project is not complete without the application, so lets create a application inside the project and have a look at the structure

django-admin.py startapp app

# django_project
__init__.py
app/
    __init__.py
    models.py
    tests.py
    views.py
manage.py
settings.py
urls.py

even after including this, the number of files is still less than the rails project.

Lets break it down and relate both the frameworks.

• Logging, unders the logs directory
• Some default html files for some standard http errors, under the public directory
• Rails has very good support for testing, for that bunch of files under tests
• Vendor/Plugin, place for some third party plugins/applications.

• Scaffold magic
• Generate commands
• Migrations

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