Question

In other words, what did you not know when you started with Django that you wish someone had told you?

I’ve dabbled some in Django but nothing really serious. However, I’m hoping to change that, and I’m wondering if there’s any gotchas/shortcomings/whatever that I need to be aware of as I go.

Answer 1

Be aware of specifying absolute paths in your settings.py file. Django doesn’t come with an out-of-the-box solution for making everything relative, and you have to employ Python’s utilities. The usual solution is something like:

import os
def abspath(file):
    return os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), file).replace('\\','/')

(The last replace part is for Windows runs).

And then use it as follows:

DATABASE_NAME = abspath('mydb.db')
MEDIA_ROOT = abspath('media/')

etc.