Batteries Included Django



Accelerate your Project with the Ecosystem



by Kevin Stone
CTO/Founder Subblime

GH: kevinastone | TW: @kevinastone | LI: kevinastone

Our Current Requirements.txt

distribute>=0.6.28
mysql-python>=1.2.4
Django>=1.5
pillow
south>=0.8,<2.0
sorl-thumbnail
hamlpy
requests>=1.0
djangorestframework>=2.3.4
unicodecsv

# Django Enhancements
django-extensions
django-model-utils
django-templated-email
django-grappelli>=2.4.5
django-floppyforms
django-filter
django-braces

# Datetime
pytz
iso8601
python-dateutil>=1.5,<2.0

# Deployment
uwsgi
Werkzeug
fabric

# Analytics
numpy
pandas
# Caching
redis
hiredis
django-redis-cache
johnny-cache

# Django Compressor
django-compressor>=1.3
lxml
BeautifulSoup<4.0
cssmin
slimit
django-sekizai

# Celery
django-celery-with-redis
django-celery-transactions

# Social
gdata
google-api-python-client
oauth2client
django-social-auth>=0.7.22
facepy

# Services
mixpanel-celery>=0.6.0
raven>=3.0

lettuce>=0.2.18

Testing Requirements.txt



factory_boy>=1.3,<2.0    # Guard against potential 2.0 breaking changes
mock

# Nose
nose<1.3	# Nose 1.3 breaks test discovery somehow
django-nose
coverage
nose-exclude
nose-progressive>=1.4.1
nosexcover
yanc
xtraceback

# Validaiton
pep8
flake8
Lettuce Requirements

# Make sure you have Chromium installed (or appropriate for your dev platform)
splinter>=0.5    # Need 0.5 for PhantomJS support
selenium>=2.28	# Need 2.28 for PhantomJS support

Basic Includes for Just About Every Project


  • Pillow (Image Manipulation)
  • sorl-thumbnail (Thumbnail Generation)
  • South (DB Migrations)
  • Requests (HTTP client)
  • Django-Rest-Framework* (ReST API endpoint)

DateTime Fixes
  • pytz (Timezone support)
  • iso8601 (date formatting)
  • python-dateutil (parsing and translation)

  • unicodecsv (Fixes encoding for CSV import/export)
*or Tastypie or Django-Piston, but DRF is way better

General Django Helpers


  • django-extensions
    • runserver_plus + shell_plus management commands (Werkzeug Debugger)
    • Useful generic model fields (CreationDateTimeField, etc)
  • django-model-utils
    • Improved Querysets (PassThroughManager, InheritanceManager)
  • django-braces
    • CBV Mixins (instead of ugly decorators)

Django CRUD Helpers


  • django-filter
    • Don't write your own query string parameterizations
  • django-floppyforms
    • Better templates for django forms
    • import floppyforms as forms

Admin Tools
  • django-grappelli (nicer skin)
  • django-extensions (again)
    • ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin makes admin useable for relations (search field instead of dropdown)

Batch Processing

Celery

  • django-celery
  • django-celery-transactions
    • Delays task delivery until transactions commit to eliminate race conditions

Mail

  • django-templated-email
    • Template support for mail subjects, and HTML + Plain versions

Cleaner Frontend Code


  • HamlPy (Template loader)
    • More readable and concise html generation
    • (Also more version control friendly since it's line based)

  • Django Compressor
    • Supports LessCSS and Coffeescript
    • lxml, BeautifulSoup, cssmin, slimit for minification
    • NPM Packages: less, jshint, recess, uglify-js, coffee-script

  • django-sekizai
    • Adding resources in template fragments on demand

Haml Templates


<p>A bunch of placeholder text about your company.</p>
<div class="actions">
    <div class="action-container pull-left">
        <a class="flat-button block-level call-to-action" href="{% url "join" %}">Join our Site!</a>
    </div>
    <div class="action-container pull-right">
        <a class="flat-button block-level call-to-action" href="{% url "login" %}">Sign In</a>
    </div>
</div>

%p
    A bunch of placeholder text about your company.
.actions
    .action-container.pull-left
        %a.flat-button.block-level.call-to-action{'href': '{% url "join" %}'}
            Join our Site!
    .action-container.pull-right
        %a.flat-button.block-level.call-to-action{'href': '{% url "login" %}'}
            Sign In

Another Haml Template

<div class="product-information-container">
    <div class="product-information">
        <h4>
            {% if headline %}{{ headline }}{% endif %}
            {% if url %}
            <p>
                <p>
                    <a href="{{ url }}">{{ url|format_url }}</a>
                </p>
            </p>
            {% endif %}
        </h4>
        {% if description %}
        <p class="description">{{ description }}</p>
    </div>
</div>
.product-information-container
    .product-information
        %h4
            - if headline
                = headline
            - if url
                %p
                    %a{'href': '={url}'}
                        = url|format_url
        - if description
            %p.description<
                = description

Django Sekizai

Base Template
{% render_block "js" %}
or with Django Compressor Processors (Coffeescript)

{% render_block "js" postprocessor "compressor.contrib.sekizai.compress" %}

Included Fragment Example
- addtoblock "js"
    %script{'type': 'text/javascript', 'src': '{% static "js/jquery/jquery.timeago.js" %}'}
- endaddtoblock "js"
Included Fragment Example (Coffeescript)
{% addtoblock "js" %}
    <script type="text/coffeescript" src="{% static js/directives/date.coffee" %}"></script>
{% endaddtoblock "js" %}

Algorithmic/Data Science


  • NumPy
  • Pandas
    • Powerful data transformations (esp. for time series data)

Other Useful Libs
  • SciPy
    • Algorithms galore
  • NLTK (language processing + statistics primitives)
  • PyMC (Bayesian inference)

Caching


  • redis
  • hiredis (faster bindings for redis)
  • django-redis-cache (cache backend using redis)

  • johnny-cache (transparent queryset caching)

APIs and Authentication


  • django-social-auth (oauth consumers)
  • Google
    • oauth2client
    • google-api-python-client
    • gdata
  • Facebook
    • facepy

  • mixpanel-celery
  • raven (for Sentry)

Deployment


  • Fabric (automation)
  • uWSGi (WSGi container)
  • Werkzeug (Lightweight WSGi framework)

Testing


  • Factory-boy (Fixtures)
  • mock (Mocking and Stubbing)

Feature Tests
  • lettuce
  • selenium (web browser automation)
  • splinter (selenium wrapper)

Validation
  • pep8 (coding standards)
  • flake8 (static analysis)

Nose Plugins

  • nose
  • django-nose
    • Nose based Test Runner for Django
  • coverage
    • Code Coverage
  • nose-exclude
    • Adds --exclude-dir= flags to skip certain dirs
  • nose-progressive
    • Progress bar for test runner
  • nosexcover (worst package name ever)
    • Code coverage for xunit results (for Jenkins)
  • yanc
    • Output Color-izer
  • xtraceback
    • Better Test Tracebacks



Questions?



The End





About the Author:

Kevin Stone is the CTO and Founder of Subblime

Interested in working on these challenges?  Subblime is hiring

Batteries Included Django

By Kevin Stone

Batteries Included Django

List of useful 3rd party python and django packages to help accelerate your django web app.

  • 4,780