First View

Creating Django index.html

Assume a directory structure such as the following:

~/workspace/mysite/mysite
~/workspace/mysite/siteapp


Here is an explanation of how views work.

1) The url matches in the mysite/urls.py

2) any matching part is stripped off, and sent to the siteapp/urls.py

3) a view is returned based on this match. This view is actually a function that returns
an HTML template (html with variables/programming logic).

4) We need to create the template to make sure it exists.


//////////////////// 1 ///////////////////////////

In the mysite/urls.py add the following lines

from django.conf.urls import url, include

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^mysite/', include("siteapp.urls")),
]
///////////////////// 2 ////////////////////////////

If a user types in https://www.domain.com/mysite, django will
send https://www.domain.com to siteapp/urls.py file for further processing.
Firstly, make sure this file exists,

$ touch ~/workspace/mysite/siteapp/urls.py

Then add the following lines

from django.conf.urls import url
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^$', views.index, name='index')
    ]

////////////// 3 /////////////////////////

Next, we need to make sure that ~/workspace/mysite/siteapp/views.py
contains a function named index. Add the following lines to that file,

from django.shortcuts import render

# Create your views here.
def index(request):
    return render(request, 'siteapp/index.html', {'something': 'World!'})

////////////////// 4 ///////////////////////

The above function returns an html template located in ~/workspace/mysite/siteapp/templates/siteapp/index.html
We need to make sure this file exists. The function also substitutes all occurrences of the variable "{{ something }}"
with "World!".

Create the directory if it does not exist,
$ mkdir -p ~/workspace/mysite/siteapp/templates/siteapp/

Then add the following lines,
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
{% extends "base.html" %}
<html>
    <head>
        <title>MySite!</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p>Hello {{ something }}</p>
    </body>
</html>

////////////////////////////////////////////////

Go ahead and run the dev server and visit the page to make sure it works.

$ ./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:80