Overview

We will be building a full-fledged school management system and deploying it to the web. We will be starting from scratch and gradually building up on the foundation of our Django knowledge. There will be a proper explanation for every code block that we write. Let us first list all functionalities that we will be having in our school management system. Managing

• Student records

• Teacher records

• Attendance records

• Subjects

• academic reports/performance

Prerequisites

• Text editor/ IDE (Pycharm or VS code or any other you like)

• Installed Python 3 interpreter

• Familiarity with Python 3

For creating templates

• HTML

• CSS

• Javascript

Setting up a virtual environment

Before starting with the project we need to create a virtual environment where all the modules and packages we need will be saved. The virtual environment is very useful for development it helps to avoid problems with package version compatibility.

Create a new folder and open it in your text editor

Open integrated terminal in it. For VS code you can press

CTRL + Shift + `

To create a virtual environment on Linux / Mac system enter the following command

# python3 -m venv <name of virtual environment>
python3 -m venv env

# Activating your newly created virtual environment
source env/bin/activate

After activating the virtual environment the terminal prompt will look something like this

Now we need to add some packages that we need to start our Django project. In the terminal type either of the following command.

# Adding Django to the virtual environment
pip3 install django
# or
pip install django

Starting a new Django project

To start a new Django project we will use django-admin CLI tool. Enter the following command to start a new Django project.

django-admin startproject core .

Pay attention to the trailing (.). This trailing " . " will start a new Django project in the current directory. If you omit the period in the end. It will create a new folder named core and then inside it will start a new project.

What do these files do?

• core/__init__.py

  This file makes the Python interpreter treat the directory as a python module.

• core/asgi.py and core/wsgi.py

  These files are used by the application server to communicate with the Django application.

• core/settings.py

  This file contains very important configurations of our Django application including secret key, static files settings, database configurations, and much more.

• core/urls.py

  This file contains the root URLs of your Django project. Here we define the path for various Django apps.

Try running the project

Start the development server using the following command

python manage.py runserver
# or
python3 manage.py runserver

Now open up the link in your browser

To stop the development server press CTRL + C

In the next part, we will be creating a new application that will handle the authentication and authorization of our Django project.

Next Part

Follow to get notified of upcoming parts of this project. Happy Learning!