This project was heavily influenced by the django-twoscoops-project that can be found at https://github.com/twoscoops/django-twoscoops-project

You'll need to setup your virtual environment first, and I recommend using virtualenvwrapper. So, go ahead ahead and create your virtual environment

    # First create your project directory:
    mkdir foobar && cd foobar

    # And then make your virtual environment
    mkvirtualenv foobar
    
    # The virtual environment will already be activated, but in the 
    # future to switch to this environment you'll need to do
    workon foobar
    
    # Install django into your virtual environment
    pip install django==1.5.1
    

When starting a new Django project, use the --template and --extension args to django-admin.py. For example, to create a new project called foobar you can do something like this:

    django-admin.py startproject \
      --template=https://github.com/abemusic/django-base-project/archive/master.zip \
      --extension=py,rst,html foobar .

This basically tells django to create a new project called foobar in the current directory and use a project template from the zip file on github. The extension argument instructs django to treat any files with the .py, .rst, and .html extension as templates and render them with a particular context. For example, the HTML files might reference a variable called {{ project_name }}, and django would render that as foobar in this case. For more information on starting a new project or app using templates, see the documentation at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#startproject-projectname-destination

Now that you have a virtualenv and a foobar Django project, you can get started on your next awesome app. Some things that might be of interest in this template:

• My requirements files to work with my common setup, so YMMV. It should even work on heroku as well. To install packages from a requirements file in your virtualenv, use pip with the -r argument and point it to the file:

  # For development, use the local requirements file
  pip install -r requirements/local.txt

• I've updated django settings to pull 'secret' stuff from environment variables, so you'll need to include these in your environment. I suggest not adding them to your .bash_profile or .bashrc, but instead take advantage of virtualenv-wrappers postactivate script that's located in your virtualenv's bin directory. You can quickly get to that locacation by typing cdvirtualenv. There's a template of a common script I use in etc/postactivate

• Database configuration is using the dj-database-url utility to create the database dictionary from a URI string that's pulled from the DATABASE_URL environment variable.