Question

Hi thanks for looking into this.

I have been following Django’s tutorial on URLs and got a bit confused/stuck on this part:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/intro/tutorial03/#decoupling-the-urlconfs

what I do not understand is if, say, on page mypage.com I provide only 2 possible URLs for mypage.com/polls and mypage.com/admin, what happens if the user goes to mypage.com? Obviously, I thought, the user will need to see some sort of ‘welcome’ page so I decided to add another URL to that urls.py:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
 url(r'^/', 'myapp.views.welcome'), #when it's just mysite.com

 url(r'^myapp/', include('myapp.urls')), #includes everything with mysite.com/myapp/...
 url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

But then I get redirected to that welcome view from whichever page, whether i go to /myapp or not. So, I decided to create a views.py file outside myapps folder and put that welcome page there, and it seems to have worked, apart from that I get a 404.

I am so confused! Could you explain in lamers’ terms please

Thanks,
blargie-bla

Answer 1

It should be

url(r'^$', 'myapp.views.welcome')

otherwise any URL will match the pattern. Django will call the view for the first pattern in urlpatterns that matches, so you need to be specific and include the end-of-the-line character ($) into the pattern.