Django directory design philosophy question

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左小龙

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May 26, 2017, 9:57:04 PM5/26/17
to Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)
1. Why not create urls.py for every app when user run startapp command? I think most app need urls.py except when using other framework like django-rest-framework.

2. When we run `django-admin startproject mysite` will also create an inner directory call mysite which is very confuse to newbie.  Some people recommend use `django-admin startproject mysite .`(comma at the last) instead. Should we also recommend this in the document?

Adam Johnson

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May 28, 2017, 9:14:09 AM5/28/17
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1. I don't see why not. Even DRF apps need urls.py files right?
2. I think this is a minor issue and not worth worrying about, newbies should be able to move files and folders around appropriately on the filesystem. It's cleaner to put things in a subdirectory as it lowers the risk of overwriting existing files in the current directory.

On 27 May 2017 at 02:51, 左小龙 <wiwi...@gmail.com> wrote:
1. Why not create urls.py for every app when user run startapp command? I think most app need urls.py except when using other framework like django-rest-framework.

2. When we run `django-admin startproject mysite` will also create an inner directory call mysite which is very confuse to newbie.  Some people recommend use `django-admin startproject mysite .`(comma at the last) instead. Should we also recommend this in the document?

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Aymeric Augustin

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May 28, 2017, 10:04:31 AM5/28/17
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Hello,

Sorry Adam, I'm going to argue for the opposite position on both questions ;-)

I don't think it's a good idea for add urls.py to startapp for three reasons:

a. Even though Django's built-in boilerplates (startprojet and startapp) are fairly minimal, I've seen many projets with the dummy models, admin or tests module committed in a bunch of apps, creating noise. More files will make that problem worse. (I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of boilerplates in general.)

b. Some developers like giving each app its own URL space. Others prefer keeping all URLs in a central location. Small projects can stick with the simplest thing that works and a central URLconf does the job up to a few dozen routes. Large projects, by the time they become large, have had the time to understand the tradeoffs and figure out what structure works best for them. I think startapp is most useful to people with little Django experience and splitting urls.py is a premature optimization for them.

c. Unlike admin.py which is autodiscovered, urls.py won't do anything until it's referenced from the main URLconf. It would be misleading to add a module that doesn't work. I think the potential for confusion may outweigh the usefulness.

Regarding the target directory of startproject, I'm in favor of the proposal. Here's the background:

The default behavior keeps biting me, even though I no longer qualify myself as a Django newbie, and I'm not the only one who finds it surprising. Unix commands operate in the current directory unless told otherwise: example: `ls` vs. `ls path/to/directory`.

Certainly files can be moved around after the fact — I do it every time — but this doesn't excuse the counter-intuitive API. I don't have the energy to argue for breaking backwards-compatibility here. But I'm strongly in favour of acknowledging this bug in the documentation (I haven't checked what it looks like currently).

Best regards,

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Adam Johnson

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May 28, 2017, 1:15:28 PM5/28/17
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On (2), cookiecutter's behaviour is to create a new directory and it probably gets more traffic than startproject.

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Josh Smeaton

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Jun 4, 2017, 6:16:21 PM6/4/17
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I agree that creating a "project" subdirectory inside the code directory, that's usually named the same thing, can be quite confusing. I'd like to see some kind of improvement here, but I haven't done the research to see what makes sense.

The cognitive overhead of myproject/myproject, especially in the tutorial, can be especially confusing.
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