Poetry

Audience

1. Peo­ple who already know Django but don’t know Django Rest frame­work.

2. Though, you can still pro­ceed if you know zero Django.

Introduction

I’m plan­ning on writ­ing a series on Django Rest Frame­work. The series aims to pro­vide a very con­cise intro­duc­tion to the frame­work. We would kick­start the series by dis­cussing depen­dency man­age­ment using poetry (check out uv for a great alter­na­tive). Grab the code, and let’s write some Poetry.

Why Django Rest framework?

Django works great with its tem­plate sys­tem but we might need to define APIs to work with Javascript frame­works. And, DRF pro­vides this func­tion­al­ity.

Creating a project

Assume that we now have Poetry installed. Note that I’m on Linux but most of what we are about to do works on other plat­forms.

• Cre­ate a direc­tory named dog-house.

• Run

  cd dog-house
  poetry init

  to ini­tial­ize the project direc­tory.

  The prompt would pop up. We then pro­vide impor­tant fields as below:

  Pack­age name [dog-house]:             # Press Enter
  Com­pat­i­ble Python ver­sions [>=3.12]:  # Press Enter
  Would you like to define your main depen­den­cies inter­ac­tively? (yes/no) [yes] no
  Would you like to define your devel­op­ment depen­den­cies inter­ac­tively? (yes/no) [yes] no

  Note that some non-impor­tant fields are left out.

• We then cre­ate a file named poetry.toml with the fol­low­ing con­tent:

  [vir­tualenvs]
  in-project = true

  This will flag the cre­ation of the direc­tory .venv locally.

• We can add depen­den­cies by run­ning poetry add <pack­age-name>.

  poetry add Django
  poetry add djan­gor­est­frame­work
  poetry add django-rest-knox

  The pack­age name is avail­able on the pypy.org.

• To cre­ate a Django project, we run

  poetry run django-admin start­pro­ject mysite
  cd mysite
  poetry run python star­tapp dog_house

  Note that mysite is our main Django app, in the sense that it’s the only app that con­tains set­tings.py. We’ll touch this in the last part, you don’t have to worry about it now. The dog_house is the app we’ll work on most of the time.

• We can check if every­thing is work­ing prop­erly by run­ning

  poetry run python man­age.py run­server

  Fol­low the URL gen­er­ated in the ter­mi­nal to see the greet­ing page.

Outro

That’s it for today. See you next time!!

References

• https://docs.djan­go­pro­ject.com/en/5.2/intro/tuto­r­ial01/

• https://python-poetry.org/docs/