What we will learn

• Django for APIs

• A Beginner’s Guide to Docker

The source of this summary The first link

The source of this summary The second link

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Docker

Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.

Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. Docker enables you to separate your applications from your infrastructure so you can deliver software quickly. With Docker, you can manage your infrastructure in the same ways you manage your applications.

With Docker we now longer have to mess around with virtual environments. We can faithfully reproduce a production environment locally. And Docker can be shared among team members so everyone is working on the same setup. Wins all around.

The important takeaways from this tutorial are this:

• Docker is a way to run Linux containers
• Containers are a lightweight alternative to Virtual Machines
• Dockerfile is a list of instructions for creating an image
• Images are made up of one or more layers
• Containers are a running instance of an image
• docker-compose.yml controls how to run the container
• Containers are stateless and ephemeral in nature. We can link the local filesystem via volumes but things become more complex with databases (which we didn’t cover here).

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Library Website and API

Django REST Framework works alongside the Django web framework to create web APIs. We cannot build a web API with only Django Rest Framework; it always must be added to a project after Django itself has been installed and configured.

Traditional Django

• init.py is a Python way to treat a directory as a package; it is empty asgi.py stands for Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface and is a new option in Django 3.0+
• settings.py contains all the configuration for our project
• urls.py controls the top-level URL routes
• wsgi.py stands for Web Server Gateway Interface and helps Django serve the eventual web pages
• manage.py executes various Django commands such as running the local web server or creating a new app.
• Run migrate to sync the database with Django’s default settings and start up the local Django web server.

  First app

  Each app has a init.py file identifying it as a Python package. There are 6 new files created:

• admin.py is a configuration file for the built-in Django Admin app
• apps.py is a configuration file for the app itself
• the migrations/ directory stores migrations files for database changes
• models.py is where we define our database models
• tests.py is for our app-specific tests
• views.py is where we handle the request/response logic for our web app