Introduction

Some of my faithful visitors may have noticed that I have a thing for Vim, one of the oldest and most powerful text editors in the world. In the past 15 or so years that I've been developing, I have spent quite a bit of time in several different text editors. It seemed like I was continually on the quest to find the fastest, most feature-packed editor out there, while still being cross-platform compatible and having it stay out of my way. Speed has always been very important to me.

I have been using Vi and Vim regularly since about 2000, when I began dabbling with Linux. I could certainly hold my ground in either of the two programs, but I was by no means proficient. The more appealing text editors for me offered syntax highlighting and code completion. At the time, I was under the impression that Vi/Vim didn't offer either of these two features. It wasn't until around the middle of last year, however, that I really started putting effort into learning and using Vim. After asking some of my Vim-savvy friends a lot of questions to get me kickstarted, I began to see the power that lies in Vim.

Before long, Vim had replaced all other text editors as my preferred editing environment. I learned that Vim could satisfy just able every single one of my personal qualifications for the perfect editor. I dumped all other editors in favor of Vim, and I even opted to use Vim over a several hundred dollar IDE at work.

Anyway. I received a review copy of Kim Schulz' "Hacking Vim: A cookbook to get the most out of the latest Vim editor" a couple of months ago and have been rummaging through it since then. I have learned a ton of fantastic tips from this little book! Being a cookbook, you're not expected to read the entire book start to finish. Rather, you can dig right into whatever section interests you and feel right at home.

Brief Overview

Packt Publishing printed this book back in 2007, but all of the tips are still very much up-to-date. The book starts off with the obligatory history lesson (which is actually quite interesting if you're a nerd like me), and the target audience is described as such:

New users join the Vim user community every day and want to use this editor in their daily work, and even though Vim sometimes can be complex to use, they still favor it above other editors. This is a book for these Vim users.

After the history lesson, chapter 2 of the book digs right into personalizing Vim to fit your own preferences. Topics covered include:

• changing fonts
• changing color schemes
• personalizing highlighting
• customizing the status line
• toggling menus and toolbars in gvim
• adding your own menu items and toolbar buttons
• customizing your work area

Chapter 3 discusses better navigation techniques. Topics covered include:

• faster navigation in a file
• faster navigation in the Vim help system
• faster navigation in multiple buffers
• in-file searching
• searching in multiple files or buffers
• using marks and signs

Chapter 4, titled "Production Boosters" discusses the following:

• templates using simple template file
• templates using abbreviations
• auto-completion using known words and tag lists
• auto-completion using omni-completion
• macros
• sessions
• registers and undo branches
• folding
• vimdiff
• opening remote files using Netrw

Chapter 5 introduces some advanced formatting tips. You can learn how to put text into nicely-formatted paragraphs, aligning text, marking headlines, and creating lists. For code, this chapter discusses several different indentation options.

Vim scripting is the topic of chapter 6, and Schulz covers a wide variety of useful tips to get anyone started on scripting Vim to do their bidding. Tips include:

• creating syntax-coloring scripts
• how to install and use scripts
• different types of scripts
• basic syntax of Vim scripts
• how to structure Vim scripts
• debugging a Vim script
• using other scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby)

Appendix A describes how Vim can be used for much more than just text editing. Several different games, including Tetris and a Rubik's Cube are briefly introduced, along with how to use Vim as a mail client or programmer's IDE. Appendix B suggests miscellaneous configuration script maintenance tips, such as how you can maintain the same configuration script across several different machines.

My Thoughts

I was very impressed with this book. I was afraid that, being published in 2007, it might be a little too out-of-date for my personal tastes. Since the book is about Vim, though, I wasn't overly concerned (the editor has been around for decades, and it doesn't change drastically from release to release anymore).

Just like the last book I reviewed, I found several typos in this book. A lot of the typos were in the first few pages of the actual content, and some were definitely more minor than others. This sort of thing doesn't really detract much from the material covered, but it sure does stand out as a distraction for people who pay attention to details.

Here are some of the things that I truly enjoyed reading and learning about (many of which actually made my jaw drop in awe of Vim)

• Specifying multiple fonts for GVim, just in case your first choice isn't always available:

  :set guifont=Courier\ New\ 12, Arial\ 10
  

• Specifying different font faces based on the extension of the file you're editing:

  :autocmd BufEnter *.txt set guifont=Arial\ 12
  

• Highlighting the line your cursor is currently on, and the column the cursor is in:

  :set cursorline
  :set cursorcolumn
  

• Limiting the number of suggestions that the spell checker offers:

  :set spellsuggest=5
  

• Navigating to different words based on whitespace instead of "regular" word separators:

  • W to move to the beginning of the next word
  • B to move to the beginning of the previous word
  • E to move to the beginning of the previous word

  I knew about the lowercase variations of these commands, but not the uppercase.

• Navigating up and down in the same long, wrapped line:

  gk
  gj
  

• Opening a file that is referenced in the current buffer:

  gf
  

  I learned that this even works on Python imports! Just like the description says, it will work on the import module, not classes or other objects from inside the module. Not quite that intelligent!

• Incremental searching:

  :set incsearch
  

• Searching up/down in a buffer for any occurrence of the word under the cursor:

  g#
  g*
  

  I knew about the usual # and *, but those two will only match the same exact word. When they're prefixed with g, they will match any occurrence of the word, be it whole or part of another word. For example, hitting g* while the cursor is over the word foo would would match both food and foobar, while * would match neither.

• Using markers to jump between specific points in different open buffers (mA through mZ)

• Prepopulating empty files based on their extension:

  :autocmd BufNewFile * silent! 0r $VIMHOME/templates/%:e.tpl
  

• Formatting a paragraph of text:

  gqap
  

• Formatting all paragraphs of text in a file:

  1gqG
  

• Smart indentation:

  :set smartindent
  

• Enabling paste mode, so smartindent doesn't try to format code that you paste into your buffer:

  :set paste
  

• Prettifying XML and HTML using Tidy:

  :autocmd FileType xml exe ":silent 1,$!tidy --input-xml true --indent yes -q"
  :autocmd FileType html,htm exe ":silent 1,$!tidy --indent yes -q"
  

Conclusion

All in all, this is a fantastic book. I will be keeping it near my workstation as a quick reference book when I want to do something crazy with Vim. I've already recommended the book to several of my friends and acquaintances, and I will make the same recommendation here. If you are mildly familiar with Vim and at all interested in getting more out of this fabulous editor, I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book.

Getting Work Done

The first thing I noticed this morning when I turned on my computer was that it took exactly 1 minute from the time I hit the power button to the time I hit the enter key to log into my computer. Logging in took an additional 15-20 seconds. That was quite nice.

The next thing I noticed was that I was not connected to my network as I should be. Clicking the system tray menu item as I did last night did the trick, but I'm going to have to investigate how to make it connect automatically at boot.

Automatic Network Connectivity

It looks like I can have my Ethernet be activated automatically by right clicking on the network manager icon in my system tray, selecting "Edit Connections," selecting "System eth0," clicking the "Edit" button, and finally checking the "Connect automatically" option in the subsequent window. We'll see if this truly activates my connection next time I boot.

In an effort to get my wireless working, I poked around a little more in the "Edit Connections" screen, but I didn't see anything that seemed useful. I did find something that seemed a bit more interesting by selecting Applications > Administration > Network Configuration from the KDE menu. This utility suggested that my wireless adapter was actually wlan1 instead of the wlan0 that the tray icon seemed to think it was.

I tweaked a few settings about my wireless adapter, such as marking the "Activate device when computer starts" and "Allow all users to enable and disable the device." In the Hardware Device tab, I selected my actual Broadcom wireless adapter instead of the non-existant wlan0. I also hit the probe button next to the "Bind to MAC address" box.

My network manager tray icon still shows no wireless networks (of which there is no shortage around here), and running iwlist scan as root says "Network is down" next to wlan1. I think I will just mess with it later. Maybe it will "just work" when I reboot next time.

Installing/Configuring The Tools

As I previously mentioned, I prefer to use things that work well without getting in my way. When talking about text editors, VIM is just fine for me, and VIM 7.2.148 is already installed on my Fedora 11. One less thing to install.

Next up comes the installation of all of the goods for Firefox. It turns out that Fedora comes with Firefox 3.5 Beta 4--a bold move. I hope my extensions all work! The extensions I will be installing right now include:

• AdBlock Plus: get rid of pesky ads that slow down my computer
• Firebug: an amazing tool when debugging Web pages
• Web Developer: has some niceties that Firebug doesn't come with
• Screengrab: fantastic for taking screenshots of full Web pages
• 2Zeus: my own little extension that allows me to quickly get short URLs a la tinyurl.com and is.gd

When I plugged in my external 1TB Seagate hard drive, I got a delicious Fatal Error message:

All appears to be in order, however, as I have access to all of the partitions on the external drive.

Next I want to install Opera. It appears that the place to look is Applications > System > Software Management in the KDE menu. Let's see what we have. Searching for Opera in the only obvious search box sent my computer into a crazy "let me do something without telling you" cycle. I have no idea what's really going on, but my processor has been maxed out for the past 3 minutes and my network has been working a little here and there. Can it really be that difficult to find a simple package? Oh! It finished! It took 6 minutes and 54 seconds to find nothing. Excellent. Let me look somewhere else.

Awesome. My computer is non-responsive. The hard drive is still working, but my GUI is doing nothing. I love it. Attempts to drop back to a trusty console using Control, Alt, and F1-F6 rendered no results. I wonder if I can SSH in from here... I sure can! Fantastic. Let's see what's happening.

It appears that X is taking up 90% of my processing power, but my computer is still not responding to any of my input. Dang it! Now my SSH session isn't working. Looks like the only option I have now is to do a hard reset. Joy of joys. Thank you for this opportunity, Fedora. Last time I did a hard reset, I was in Windows and it trashed my 1TB external.

So far rebooting seems to be going well. I wonder if my network will be setup properly still... Fantastic! It works! Wireless is still not available though. I can live without that for the time being.

Back in the Software Management utility, searching for Opera again proved to work much more quickly, but I didn't get any results. I suppose I'll just go download it from their site. The download for Opera 10 beta 1 is a mere 7.2MB, and it looks like it will open in the same Software Management utility that I've been dinking around in.

When I downloaded the Opera package, I asked it to open directly in the default program, KPackageKit. That doesn't seem to be working in the least, so I am going to try to just save it to my home directory and install it some other way. Sorry guys and gals, I ended up just dropping back to a terminal to run rpm -Uvh opera-10.00-b1.gcc4-shared-qt3.x86_64.rpm and that seemed to work fine. Opera appeared in my KDE menu, and it runs well now.

Next up is Pidgin. Pidgin 2.5.5 is installed by default, and getting it up and running was as trivial as ever.

Now to test Flash... YouTube, here I come!! Beh, Flash is not installed by default, and it's also not in the Software Management tool. What use is that thing?! Maybe if I apply all of the updates in the "Software Updates" section it will feel more useful... Here it goes.

Cool. System is unresponsive again. Let's see if I can reboot from here. Nope! Thank you, Fedora, for making me hard reset my system more in 2 hours than I have had to in YEARS. Yeah, thanks buddy.

10:50 AM So the software updates continue to not work. It appears that a ypbind package is the culprit which is causing everything to hang... I disabled it and tried to install the software updates again.

10:53 AM GUI is non-responsive again. Yay.

10:56 AM Third hard reset in 3 hours. Maybe I will have to modify my original parameters and try GNOME to see if that makes the computer usable for more than an hour at a time.

11:00 AM That's it! I'm getting rid of KDE 4... sorry folks, GNOME is my only hope of getting work done. Second clean shutdown out of 5 since the installation completed last night.

A Little Background On Yours Truly

There was a time when I was what you would call a distro-hopper. I would download any and every Linux distribution I could get my hands on. Most of them would hang around on my computer for a few days at best, but a select few actually impressed me enough to have them stick around for longer. Among those few are Slackware and Sidux. Many other distros are nice and pretty, but when it comes to me being productive on them, there always seems to be something lacking.

I am addicted to speed and reliability--two things that originally urged me to tinker with Linux all those years ago. I am more than willing to sacrifice looks and features for being able to just get something done quickly and efficiently. As a matter of fact, I'm writing this article in VIM, one of the most "light-weight" editors around these days. It allows me to do exactly what I want to do without getting in my way. That's how I like things.

That's probably the main reason I love Slackware. It won't do anything I don't tell it to do. No crazy background processes updating some package repository, slowing down my system. No pestering me about security updates that I will install in my own due time. Slackware only does what I want it to, and I have learned a ton about Linux because of it. If I decide I want something automated in the background, I have to tell the computer to do it. If one of my programs has been updated on the Internet, I download and install the package manually instead of using a "package manager." If one of my programs doesn't work because of a missing dependency, I am the one who finds and downloads the dependency. It's a lot of work initially, but I'm of the persuasion that this work is well worth it for my situation.

In today's day and age, that sort of setup seems to scare a lot of people off. People like to have things "just work." People like to not have to worry about keeping up to speed with what security threats are out there. People like having things to keep them entertained instead of getting things done. People like to see their desktop turn into a cube and spin around. People like to see things glow and wiggle on their computer. It's aesthetically pleasing. There's nothing wrong with that. Unless you want to get things done instead of just stare at your computer.

The Challenge

With that background in mind, you should be equipped to better understand the information and articles that follow. My challenge to myself is this: install Fedora 11 and use it for at least a week. To add to the the challenge, I'm installing the 64-bit version. In my past experience with 64-bit operating systems, there has been no real motivation or necessity for 64-bit computing. It just means more compatibility problems, which reduces productivity. This will be the first 64-bit operating system I actually plan to keep around beyond the exploratory period.

There are a few things about this that will bring me waaaay out of my comfort zone. They are (in no particular order):

• Fedora
• RPMs
• KDE 4

I have a strong disregard for each of these items. There was a time when I considered Fedora to be a respectable platform--back when it was Fedora Core 2 or 3. Ever since then, I feel that it has gone down the tubes. RPMs have always seemed grossly lacking in the speed department to me, and it only got worse after I found out about Debian and Slackware. Finally, KDE 4 seems like one of the absolute worst window managers I have yet to encounter. I love KDE 3.5.x. I wish I could use it everywhere I go. But KDE 4 has yet to appeal to my desire for efficient productivity--it gets in my way almost as much as GNOME does.

Starting today, I plan to look all of these opinions (as biased as they may be) straight in the eye and take 'em head-on. I am going to work on learning to enjoy using Fedora. I'm going to work on learning how to appreciate RPMs. I am going to learn to be productive in the window manager "of the future."

And I will keep you all apprised of my progress.

Create a Django Project

The first step is to create a Django project. If you already have a project that you can play with, you can skip this step. To create a project, go to a place where you want to keep your code (like C:\projects or /home/me/projects) in a command prompt/terminal and run the following command:

django-admin.py startproject myproject

This will create a new directory in your current location called myproject (you can replace myproject with whatever you'd like so long as you're consistent). This new directory will contain a few files:

• __init__.py
• manage.py
• settings.py
• urls.py

If you get an error message when running the above command, you might not have Django installed properly. See Step-by-Step: Installing Django for details on installing Django.

Create An Application

Once you have a Django project setup, you should create a new application.

Note: If you're using Windows, you will probably need to omit the ./ on the ./manage.py commands. I will include them here for everyone else who's using Linux or a Mac.

cd myproject
./manage.py startapp specialapp

This will create a new directory in your myproject directory. This new directory will contain three files: __init__.py, models.py, and views.py. We are only concerned with the models.py file in this article.

Create Your Models

Models are usually a direct representation of what your database will be. Django makes creating these models extremely easy, and Python's syntax makes them quite readable. The Django framework asks for models to be defined in the models.py file that was created in the last step. Here's an example (for my buddy who prompted the creation of this article):

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from django.db import models

class Component(models.Model):
    item_number = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    size = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    quantity = models.IntegerField(default=1)
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=8, decimal_places=2)

class Project(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    components = models.ManyToManyField(Component)
    instructions = models.TextField()

(for more information about models, see the Django Model API Reference)

I don't know about you, but that code seems pretty straightforward to me. I'll spare you all the details about what's going on (that can be a future article).

Install Your New Application

Once you have your models setup, we need to add our specialapp to our list of INSTALLED_APPS in order for Django to register these models. To do that, open up settings.py in your myproject directory, go to the bottom of the file, until you see something like

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INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
)

When you find that, add your specialapp to the list

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INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'specialapp'
)

Setup Your Database

Now you need to let Django know what kind of database you're using. Django currently supports MySQL, SQLite3, PostgreSQL, and Oracle natively, but you can get third-party tools that allow you to use other database (like SQL Server).

Still in your settings.py, go to the top until you see DATABASE_ENGINE and DATABASE_NAME. Set that to whatever type of database you are using:

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DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'
DATABASE_NAME = 'myproject.db'

Save your settings.py and go back to your command prompt/terminal.

Get Django's Opinion For Your Schema

Make sure you're in your myproject directory and run the following command:

./manage.py sqlall specialapp

This command will examine the models that we created previously and will generate the appropriate SQL to create the tables for your particular database. For SQLite, we get something like this for output:

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BEGIN;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_component" (
      "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
      "item_number" varchar(20) NOT NULL,
      "name" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
      "size" varchar(10) NOT NULL,
      "quantity" integer NOT NULL,
      "price" decimal NOT NULL
)
;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_project" (
      "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
      "name" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
      "instructions" text NOT NULL
)
;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_project_components" (
      "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
      "project_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "specialapp_project" ("id"),
      "component_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "specialapp_component" ("id"),
      UNIQUE ("project_id", "component_id")
)
;
COMMIT;

Notice how Django does all sorts of nifty things, like wrapping the table creation queries in a transaction, setting up indexes, unique keys, and defining relationships between tables. The output also offers a solution to the original problem my buddy had: an intermediate table that just keeps track of relationships between projects and components (the specialapp_project_components table).

Notice that the SQL above may not work with database servers other than SQLite.

Enhancing The Intermediate Table

After my buddy reviewed this article, he asked a very interesting and valid question: What if a project needs 3 of one component? In response, I offer the following models (this requires a modern version of Django--it doesn't work on Django 0.96.1 or earlier):

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from django.db import models

class Component(models.Model):
    item_number = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    size = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    quantity = models.IntegerField(default=1)
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=8, decimal_places=2)

class Project(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    components = models.ManyToManyField(Component, through='ProjectComponent')
    instructions = models.TextField()

class ProjectComponent(models.Model):
    project = models.ForeignKey(Project)
    component = models.ForeignKey(Component)
    quantity = models.PositiveIntegerField()

    class Meta:
        unique_together = ['project', 'component']

Running ./manage.py sqlall specialapp now generates the following SQL:

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BEGIN;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_component" (
    "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "item_number" varchar(20) NOT NULL,
    "name" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    "size" varchar(10) NOT NULL,
    "quantity" integer NOT NULL,
    "price" decimal NOT NULL
)
;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_project" (
    "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "name" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    "instructions" text NOT NULL
)
;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_projectcomponent" (
    "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "project_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "specialapp_project" ("id"),
    "component_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "specialapp_component" ("id"),
    "quantity" integer unsigned NOT NULL,
    UNIQUE ("project_id", "component_id")
)
;
CREATE INDEX "specialapp_projectcomponent_project_id" ON "specialapp_projectcomponent" ("project_id");
CREATE INDEX "specialapp_projectcomponent_component_id" ON "specialapp_projectcomponent" ("component_id");
COMMIT;

As you can see, most of the SQL is the same. The main difference is that the specialapp_project_components table has become specialapp_projectcomponent and it now has a quantity column. This can be used to keep track of the quantity of each component that a project requires. You can add however many fields you want to this new intermediate table's model.

Using This SQL

There are several ways you can use the SQL generated by Django. If you want to make your life really easy, you can have Django create the tables for you directly. Assuming that you have specified all of the appropriate database information in your settings.py file, you can simply run the following command:

./manage.py syncdb

This will execute the queries generated earlier directly on your database, creating the tables (if they don't already exist). Please note that this command currently will not update your schema if the table exists but is missing a column or two. You must either do that manually or drop the table in question and then execute the syncdb command.

Another option, if you want to keep your DDL(Data Definition Language) in a separate script (maybe if you want to keep it in some sort of version control) is something like:

./manage.py sqlall specialapp > specialapp-ddl-080813.sql

This just puts the output of the sqlall command into a file called specialapp-ddl-080813.sql for later use.

Benefits of Using Django To Create Your Schema

• Simple: I personally find the syntax of Django models to be very simple and direct. There is a comprehensive API that explains and demonstrates what Django models are capable of.
• Fast: Being that the syntax is so simple, I find that it makes designing and defining your schema much faster than trying to do it with raw SQL or using a database administration GUI.
• Understandable: Looking at the model code in Django is not nearly as intimidating as similar solutions in other frameworks (think about Java Persistence API models).
• Intelligent: Using the same model code, Django can generate proper Data Definition Language SQL for several popular database servers. It handles indexes, keys, relationships, transactions, etc. and can tell the difference between server types.

Downfalls of Using Django To Create Your Schema

• The Table Prefix: Notice how all of the tables in the SQL above were prefixed with specialapp_. That's Django's safe way of making sure models from different applications in the same Django project do not interfere with each other. However, if you don't plan on using Django for your end project, the prefix could be a major annoyance. There are a couple solutions:
  • A simple "search and replace" before executing the SQL in your database
  • Define the db_table option in your models
• Another Technology: Django (or even Python) may or may not be in your organization's current development stack. If it's not, using the methods described in this article would just become one more thing to support.

Other Thoughts

I first thought about doing the things mentioned in this application when I was working on a personal Java application. I like to use JPA when developing database-backed applications in Java because it abstracts away a lot of the database operations. However, I don't like coming up with the model classes directly, so I usually reverse engineer them from existing database tables.

Before thinking about the things discussed in this article, I created the tables by hand, making several modifications to the schema before I was satisfied with my JPA models. This proved to be quite bothersome and time-consuming.

After using Django to develop my tables, the JPA models turned out to be a lot more reliable, and they were usually designed properly from the get-go. I haven't created tables manually ever since.

If you find yourself designing database schemas often, and you find that you have to make several changes to your tables before you/the project requirements are satisfied, you might consider using Django to do the grunt work. It's worked for me, and I'm sure it will work for you too.

Good luck!

What is Django?

The Django Web site describes Django as "a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design." Basically, Django is just about the most amazing thing for Web development. I have tinkered with several different Web technologies, but nothing seems to even come close to what Django can do for me.

What is Python?

Python is a programming language used in numerous aspects of computing these days. It has a very simple yet powerful syntax. It's an easy language for beginners to pick up, but it provides adequate levels of power for the more experienced developers out there. If you have never programmed anything before, or you have dabbled with something like BASIC, Python should be fairly straightforward. If you are a programming veteran, but have only worked with languages like C, C++, Java, etc, you might struggle a bit with the syntax of the language. It's not difficult to overcome the differences in a couple hours of hands-on development.

Let's get started.

Installing Python...

Having Python installed is critical--Django does not work without Python. I'm guessing that you're relatively familiar with the procedures for installing software packages on your particular operating system. However, I will share a few notes to point you in the proper direction if you're lost. If nothing else, just head over to the Python download page to download anything you need to install Python. I whole-heartedly recommend using the latest stable version of Python for Django, but you should be able to get by with as early a version as 2.3.

Setting Up Your PYTHONPATH...

Generally speaking, if you didn't have Python installed before starting this tutorial, you will need to setup your PYTHONPATH environment variable. This is a variable that lets Python know where to find useful things (like Django).

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH

source ~/.bash_rc

Installing Django

Once you have Python and have verified that you have version 2.3 or later, you are ready to install Django. Currently, the latest stable release is 0.96.1, but this is grossly out-dated. Django 1.0 will be released on September 2nd 2008, so the "unstable" copy of Django is pretty close to what 1.0 will have to offer. There are some incredibly useful improvements in the unstable version that I don't think I could do without anymore, so that's what I'll talk about installing here.

First, you need to have a subversion client. On Windows, the most popular one is called TortoiseSVN. On Mac OS X, I have played with a few, but I think Versions is a pretty decent one. Linux also has several to choose from, but if you're using Linux, you're probably going to use the command line anyway (right?).

For brevity, I will just use the subversion commands necessary to accomplish this task (instead of discussing all GUI interfaces to subversion).

The exact location that Django should be installed differs from system to system, but here are some guidelines for typical setups:

• Windows: C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages
• Linux: /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages
• Mac OS X: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages

If you want a definite location, run the following command:

python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"

Once you know that location, go there in your command prompt or terminal session. Then execute this command svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/django django. You will see loads of output, showing all of the files that you are downloading as you install Django.

As soon as that process completes, you should run python -c "import django" to make sure everything worked properly. If the command doesn't display an ImportError, you're good. Otherwise, you need to try again.

Getting Access to Django Scripts...

Once you can successfully import django, you might want to make sure you can run the django-admin.py script that comes with Django.

sudo ln -s /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin

mkdir ~/bin

export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

source ~/.bash_rc