🐻 Welcome to Advanced Back End 🐻

⚠️ You only need to read this post if you are on the back end team 🐻

🗓️ Today’s Topics

• Using PostgreSQL with Django
• Deploying Django applications to Heroku

🎯 Project: Habit Tracker

You’ll be working on Habit Tracker this week.

It’s important to read the project requirements thoroughly and to start to think about how you would do this project.

First steps: generate the project skeleton; make sure you are using Postgres; deploy to Heroku; and design your models. Make sure to create a diagram showing model fields and relationships. Talk through with each other how you are thinking about this.

By tomorrow:

• Your application should be deployed to Heroku.
• Your models should be functional – that means you can see and work with them at least in the admin (and ideally in the Django shell) and they do what they are supposed to do.
• You should be able to create habits and associated daily records in the Django shell (I recommend using shell_plus which is available when you have django-extensions installed).

📖 Read | 📺 Watch | 🎧 Listen

These are this week’s required readings, videos, and/or podcasts. Read, watch, or listen, and take notes.

Deployment

• 📺 Katie McLaughlin, What is Deployment, Anyway?
• 📖 Full Stack Python: Deployment
• 📖 Heroku Reference: Deploying Django Apps to Heroku
  • Walkthrough: Getting Started with Python/Django Apps on Heroku
• 🎧 Deploying and Running Django Web Apps in 2021

Databases & Data Modeling

• 📖 Full Stack Python: Databases
• 📖 Full Stack Python: ORMs
• 📖 What is a relational database?
• 📖 Class-Responsibility-Collaborator Model (CRC)
• 📺 Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD), from Lucid Chart
• 📖 Writing Safe Database Migrations in Django

Debugging

• 📖 Python Debugging with Pdb
• 📺 Python Debugging with Pdb - Course on RealPython - only the first three videos are free but they are useful!
• 📺 Damilare Onajole, Debugging Python

🔖 Resources

Authentication, Registration, and the User Model in Django

• django-registration-redux
  • We are using the simple (one-step) backend
• Django docs: User Authentication
• Django docs: built-in User Model -> documentation for all the things you get for free with the User from Django
• Django docs: Extending the built-in User Model with AbstractUser
  • Django Best Practices: Custom User Model -> This tutorial is good to read for an overview, but you don’t need to follow the instructions to implement the forms to create or change a user, since we are using the django-registration-redux package for that.
• Django docs: Authentication in Web Requests -> django-registration-redux handles some of this for us (giving us the login and logout urls, for instance) but it’s helpful to see other ways you can use the authenticated user.
• The login_required decorator
• Limiting access to logged-in users that pass a test

Deployment & Other Useful Stuff

• Walkthrough: Starting a new Django Project
• 🚀 Deploying a Django app to Heroku
• Using Postgres Locally
• Django Docs: Deployment Checklist
• How to use django-extensions shell_plus

👾 Code

• Example Django Music