Learning Django (draft)

I'm learning Django with Obey the Testing Goat. This page is a draft of my miscellaneous notes.

Currently on this chapter: https://www.obeythetestinggoat.com/book/chapter_javascript.html

My temporary development environment

Here is how I set up my tools on a computer I'm temporarily using, such as one at the library.

Putty

1. Download putty from www.chiark.greenend.org.uk
2. Putty > Window > Colours > ANSI Blue > Red: 60, Green: 60, Blue: 255
3. Putty > Session > Default Settings > Save
4. Save a new session with the following set:
1. Session > Host Name
2. Connections > Data > Auto-login username.

 Vim

~/.vimrc:

syntax enable
set ic
set expandtab shiftwidth=4 smarttab autoindent

Note: Superseded by Vim for Python, which is more comprehensive.

 Screen

~/.screenrc:

shell -$SHELL
termcapinfo * ti@:te@
startup_message off

Bash

~/.bash_profile

# EDITOR
export EDITOR=vim

Websites

https://www.blogger.com for note taking
https://github.com

Creating paths in Python

Let's say you had this tree:

/home/me/example.com/passenger_wsgi.py
/home/me/example.com/virtualenv

In the Python script, to refer to the directory that is sibling to the script:

os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)), 'virtualenv')

Note that this will yield the same result even if the script is a symlink to a file located elsewhere, i.e. __file__ refers to the location of the symlink and not the original file.

Linux date command

To format a date, e.g. for use in a file name:

NAME=$(date +arbitrary_string-%F/%H%M)
echo $NAME

Result:

arbitrary_string-2017-08-18/1300