We’ve discussed all sorts of things this month, now it’s time to start putting them together more completely than snippet-for-this, snippet-for-that. I’m not going to inline command + output on everything but I am going to spell out all of the steps – if you have trouble, let me know in the comments.

To accomplish this we’re going to build a simple web service I’ve snagged “isthatanearthquake.com” for.

First order of business is creating the project.

Because virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper rocks (`pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper`), I started with `mkvirtualenv isthatanearthquake`. My global virtualenv `postactivate` script includes the line `cd $VIRTUAL_ENV` which drops me in the env whenever I activate it. Next I created a `src` directory, created and cd’ed into `isthatanearthquake-git`, created `templates` and created requirements.txt with these contents:

django==1.3.1

psycopg2==2.4.2

-e git+git://github.com/adamfast/django-quakes.git@4d9fcdb4978a28f35d1e32406a81f3b8b5d58845#egg=quakes

pip install -r requirements.txt gets me Django, Postgres and the reusable app django-quakes (thanks Sean Bleier, who I’ve forked the library from for this example) installed in my virtualenv.

Create the Django project with `python $VIRTUAL_ENV/lib/python2.?/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py startproject isthatanearthquake` (note you will need to specify your python version in this command)

`add2virtualenv isthatanearthquake` will make the new project show up on your PYTHONPATH.

Open isthatanearthquake/settings.py and `import os` at the top. Somewhere in the file (I tend to put it nearer the bottom define

PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

Set up a database: DATABASES[‘default’][‘ENGINE’] should be ‘django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis’ and [‘NAME’] should be whatever you want to call the new database.

Set your template dirs to use the templates folder created just outside the project from earlier:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, "../templates"),
)

Add ‘django.contrib.gis’, and ‘quakes’, to INSTALLED_APPS. Uncomment ‘django.contrib.admin’ (and ‘django.contrib.admindocs’, though that one isn’t strictly required it’s just my habit.) We’re done with settings.py for now.

Uncomment the line in urls.py including admin.site.urls. If you uncommented django.contrib.admindocs in INSTALLED_APPS, uncomment its include statement as well.

Create the database you configured for with `createdb -T template_postgis <dbname>`

`python manage.py syncdb` will create the necessary tables, create a superuser of your choice, and `python manage.py load_quakes` will grab the last seven days of earthquakes from USGS.

`python manage.py runserver` will pop up the development server, and now with a web browser we can hit http://localhost:8000/admin/, login and choose “Quakes” to see a list of what came in.