Large Django application layout

Question

I am in a team developing a web-based university portal, which will be based on Django. We are still in the exploratory stages, and I am trying to find the best way to lay t

Answer 1

The best way that I have found to go about this is to create applications and then a project to glue them together. Most of my projects have similar apps which are included in each. Emails, notes, action reminders, user auth, etc. My preferred layout is like so:

• project/
  • settings.py
  • urls.py
  • views.py
  • ...
• apps/
  • emails/
    • urls.py
    • views.py
    • ...
  • notes/
    • urls.py
    • views.py
    • ...
  • ...

apps:

Each of the "apps" stands on its own, and other than a settings.py, does not rely on the project itself (though it can rely on other apps). One of the apps, is the user authentication and management. It has all of the URLs for accomplishing its tasks in apps/auth/urls.py. All of its templates are in apps/auth/templates/auth/. All of its functionality is self-contained, so that when I need to tweak something, I know where to go.

project:

The project/ contains all of the glue required to put these individual apps together into the final project. In my case, I made use heavy of settings.INSTALLED_APPS in project/ to discern which views from the apps were available to me. This way, if I take apps.notes out of my INSTALLED_APPS, everything still works wonderfully, just with no notes.

Maintenance:

This layout/methodology/plan also has long-term positive ramifications. You can re-use any of the apps later on, with almost no work. You can test the system from the bottom up, ensuring that each of the apps works as intended before being integrated into the whole, helping you find/fix bugs quicker. You can implement a new feature without rolling it out to existing instances of the application (if it isn't in INSTALLED_APPS, they can't see it).

I'm sure there are better documented ways of laying out a project, and more widely used ways, but this is the one which has worked best for me so far.