Moving from PHP/Laravel to Python/Django

Question

I want some clarity. I want to learn more about django and use it as replacement for php/laravel. But the default structure and convention of django confuses me a bit.

My PHP/Laravel project has 3 parts:
- Administration
- Core (Web app for regular users)
- API Service (REST-API for mobile apps)

However all of controllers, models and views are contained in a single Laravel application. I separated Auth, Admin, Api controllers into their own folders/namespaces.

One thing that confuses me is the default Django structure 1 view 1 model file. How should i go about reworking this application in Django should each of my controllers be a separate app in my django project or should I have same approach as in Laravel. 3 Django apps in one project one for admin one for core and one for api ? Where should I keep my models than since in Laravel all models are used by all 3 parts ?

My current structure:

./  
  ./controllers/
    ./auth/  
      LoginController.php  
      RegistrationController.php  
      ...
    ./admin/    
      ReportsController.php  
      UserController.php (Admins overview of all users)    
      ...
    ./api/  
      HealthController.php (API CRUD for Health resource)  
      ExerciseController.php  
    HomeController.php  
    UserController.php (Regular users profile page CRUD)    
    ...
  ./models/  
    User.php  
    Health.php  
    Exercise.php  
    ...  

Answer 1

One thing to remember about Django is that an app in Laravel doens't necessary translate to an app in Django. In Django, there are projects, and each project can have any number of apps. For example, I have a "Backup Admin" project where I manage a lot of the day-to-day issues of managing a tape backup environment. I have an app for media (that has 3 models, one for regular media, one for cleaning media, and one for media that we want to exclude from tape ejections). I have an app that represents the backup images, and another for backup jobs (to check status codes). Each sub-piece of my project goes into another app.

If I wanted to do another Django project that had nothing to do with backups, I'd make that a completely separate project, which would have a separate directory structure from my backup project. It'd have it's own urls.py, settings.py, etc.

Regarding the models piece, I put all of one app's models in the same file. For example, in my media app, I have models.py, which contains all three models that I mentioned above. This is completely optional, but I do it just so while importing these models into other parts of the project, I don't have to remember what the file names are, instead I can just do this:

from media.models import CleaningMedia,Media,EjectExclusions

Otherwise I'd have to have 3 different import statements if they were in different files. It's completely possible, but based on your preferences.

Regarding the controller, Django lets you do it either way. You have a project-wide urls.py file that you can use to control all of the traffic, or you can have separate urls.py files in each app to control that app's traffic. I prefer a single file, but that's just me. Personally if you have a lot of controller entries, you should probably split them up into app-specific urls.py files, just to keep it clean, but again, either method would work. I think of maintainability (especially with respect to teammates having to support it) when I make these types of decisions.

The admin interface is built-in, so there's not really an app for that, but you can decide which models and which apps have entries on the admin interface quite easily. Each app has an admin.py file that controls this.

A side note, for a RESTful API, you also might want to consider Django Rest Framework. It's a great piece of software, and the documentation (and tutorials) are very helpful.

Edit: The 1 view/1 model thing again is just preference. You can have as many files as you want. The only trade off is when you import them into other files, you have to specify the file you're importing it from. That's really all there is to it. I know people who have a views/ directory, and inside there, have separate files for each view, keeping each class/function separate. Totally a matter of preference.