Starting side projects with Django

Starter template

I use django-admin startproject command for most of my projects because usually they're simple, and one-off. Otherwise, my go-to is the excellent cookiecutter-django starter template, which takes care of many things. However, I find cookiecutter-django to be quite overkill sometimes.

I've also recently discovered sidewinder, another starter template. This is another interesting option for me. It is slightly more 'minimal' compared to cookiecutter-django.

Setting up postgresql

I use the excellent Postgres.app on MacOS. For ArchLinux, I just use the one in the repositories. In servers, I just pick the one from the official repositories. But the following should work for any one of these.

When I'm starting a new project, I'm usually doing this on my macbook. Accessing the psql shell is as easy as opening the application and double clicking on one of the databases. I double click on the postgres database, and am presented with a psql shell on a Terminal window.

This is where I run the following to create a new database and setup a role.

CREATE DATABASE <db_name>;

Where <db_name> is the name of the new database, of course. The following,

CREATE USER <db_name> WITH PASSWORD '<db_name>';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE <db_name> TO <db_name>;

creates a new user/role with the same name and grants all permissions on that database.

Error while installing psycopg2

I forgot to put postgresapp on the path the first time. Which made it throw an error when installing psycopg2. Following was taken from postgresapp.com.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/paths.d &&
echo /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/bin | sudo tee /etc/paths.d/postgresapp