Understanding directory structure advice

Question

I started to create in Django sample project, first command:

django-admin.py startproject test

gives me:

- root
  - test
    - __init__.py 
    - settings.py 
    - urls.py 
    - wsgi.py 
    - manage.py

Now I create first app:

python manage.py startapp foo

it created for me folder root/foo

so how I should understand my root/test folder. Is this folder for global config of my project and nothing more? (similar to Symfony 2 app folder)

I am confused because Django docs tells:

The inner mysite/ directory is the actual Python package for your project

but manage.py startapp foo create app under root, not under root/test (mysite equivalent)

[EDIT]

Two commands:

python manage.py startapp app

and:

django-admin.py startapp app

gives me app inside project root, not under root/name_of_generated_project

Django 1.4

[EDIT] 2

Sorry guys, my fault, now is everything ok.

[EDIT] 3

I want to create another project again:

django-admin.py startproject jobeet

my initial structure is similar to above.

Now I want to try create app (inside jobeet folder):

django-admin.py startapp jobs

and I end up with jobeet/jobs not jobeet/jobeet/jobs

again :/

so inside my project root I have:

- jobeet
- jobs
- manage.py

another command:

python manage.py startapp app

gives me the same result

Answer 1

So let's say you create a new Django project testproject:

django-admin.py startproject testproject

This creates a new project with the following minimal set of files:

testproject/
├── __init__.py
├── manage.py
├── settings.py
└── urls.py

To create a new app for your first site mysite1 go into testproject directory and run:

python manage.py startapp mysite1

which results in a new directory mysite1 for the mysite1 app.

I.e. with just these two commands you would arrive at this hierarchy:

testproject/
├── __init__.py
├── manage.py
├── mysite1
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── models.py
│   ├── tests.py
│   └── views.py
├── settings.py
└── urls.py

Refer to the django-admin.py and/or manage.py individual commands here.

In Django there is a one-to-many relationship between a project and an app. An app is usually one individual site component (e.g. comments, ratings), whereas a project is an organisation of several apps and can power many different sites. That's why you get the sites framework. In practice, one project usually serves one website, but with Django sites app with one project you can serve as many websites as you like, for reusability's sake.

P.S. I think creating a project simply called test is not a good practice because with Django unit tests at app level unit tests will go into a file called tests.py or within a folder called tests.

UPDATE for Django 1.4

As @zeantsoi has commented below, my answer:

applies to Django 1.3 and prior. Per the docs, beginning in 1.4, base configuration files (including settings.py, urls.py, and wsgi.py) are abstracted into a subdirectory titled the same name as the project.