Django is a popular Python framework for writing web applications. Web frameworks like Django provide a set of tools which helps the developer to write the application faster as the framework takes care of the internal structure, thus the developer needs to take care of the application development only. Django is free and open source software.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation Django on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Install Django on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing pip and necessary dependencies.
Now you can install pip using the following command:
sudo apt-get install python3-pip
Step 4. Installing Djanggo on Ubuntu 16.04.
Once the pip is installed, run the following command to install Django:
sudo pip3 install django
To verify the Django version, run:
django-admin --version
Step 5. Create a sample Django project.
Now that the Django framework has been installed, you can to give it a test drive by creating a sample project:
cd ~ django-admin startproject myproject
The command above will create a directory myproject in your working directory ~, and store all necessary files within.
Run the commands below in sequence to get your application started. Follow the instructions on screen to provide the superuser’s credentials:
cd myproject/ python3 manage.py migrate python3 manage.py createsuperuser python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
Step 6. Accessing Django.
Django will be available on HTTP port 8080 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com:8000 or http://server-ip:8000/admin
Verifying
To verify that Django can be seen by Python, type python from your shell. Then at the Python prompt, try to import Django:
>>> import django >>> print(django.get_version()) 2.2
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed Django. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Django web framework on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus server. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Django web site.