Django hello world

Hello world in django: Django lets you build Web Apps with Python. In this article we’ll create the hello world app. This app will show the message “Hello World”.

Django is an open-source Python Web Framework. You can develop secure websites and web applications with Django. Are you ready to do Django programming with Python?

Related course:
Django Web Developer Course

Make a new project

You can develop and deploy your Django Python app directly online. This saves you a lot of time.

Create an account and select the option Add a new web app You can setup a Python Django app with only a few clicks.

python web app

Click next and select “Django” from the list of Python modules.

python django

Then select the latest Python version (>= 3.7) from the list of versions and click next.
Create a name for your project and click next.

django

Click next. It’s setting up the Web App using Python and Django. You can then immediately access it online, using the url shown.

python django example

Open a console in the pythonanywhere web interface and edit the file views.py. You can edit it with any text editor like nano, vim etc.

Add the content below to the file views.py

from django.http import HttpResponse

def helloView(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello world")

The function helloView() will be called, each time someone opens the webpage.

The function returns a HttpResponse, this is text that is shown in your web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari).

Then open the file urls.py and modify it to the code below:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path
from .views import helloView

urlpatterns = [
    path('', helloView, name='hello')
]

This file maps all of the paths to the Python functions. In this case the webpage path ‘’ (domain name) maps to the helloView function.

Finally restart the server by clicking the green button on your project page.
Open the url in your web browser, and you’ll see Hello world in the web page.

hello world in python django

That’s it!

Develop offline

I highly recommend developing your app online, using the tutorial shown above. Because this saves you a lot of time and is the easiest way to get started. You can skip the section below.

If you only want to develop offline only (not recommended), you can execute these commands in a terminal:

django-admin startproject first_django_project
cd first_django_project/
python manage.py startapp hello

Wait.. what did we just do?

We created a project named first_django_project
We created an app named hello
Django projects can have multiple apps. Every app is like a website component, it has unique functionality.

Hello world code

You generated some Django code. You can modify this code to turn it into the hello world program. If you open the folder /first_django_project/hello you’ll see this:

django app

A lot of code! Which file do we need to change?

There’s one file named views.py. If you open the file you’ll see this:

from django.shortcuts import render

# Create your views here.

You create your view in here. A view returns what the visitor sees: a webpage. Any webpage is defined in the HTML language.

Create a view like this:

from django.shortcuts import render

# Create your views here.

import textwrap

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.views.generic.base import View

class HomePageView(View):

    def dispatch(request, *args, **kwargs):
        response_text = textwrap.dedent('''\
            <html>
            <head>
                <title>Hello World!</title>
            </head>
            <body>
                <h1>Hello world</h1>
                <p>Hello, world! Hola Mundo!</p>
            </body>
            </html>
        ''')
        return HttpResponse(response_text)

We create a class HomePageView with the method dispatch.
This methods return the webpage code (in HTML).

URL router

Python needs to return the view, if we visit the webpage.

If we visit a webpage, the web browser sends a HTTP request. To link views with the HTTP request, we create a new route.

In the app directory, create the file hello/urls.py with this content:

  
from django.conf.urls import url
from hello.views import HomePageView

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^$', HomePageView.as_view(), name='home'),
]

In the project directory, change /first_django_project/urls.py:

  
from django.conf.urls import include, url

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'', include('hello.urls')),
]

Change app settings

Then we edit first_django_project/settings.py. Apps can be added or removed in this file.
You’ll see a list definition:

  
INSTALLED_APPS = [ .. ]

Add our hello app to this list.

We’ll remove the line SessionAuthenticationMiddleware.
Finally we’ll disable the database. This is defined somewhere on line 72.

  
DATABASES = {
...
}

Remove those lines.

All set!

Run the command:

python manage.py runserver

Then open the URL to see the result:

django hello world

If you see the above result, you completed this lesson!