There are many instructions how to run Django in Docker. The base configuration of docker-compose usualy has the next services: nginx, web (django), db (mysql, postgresql), cache (memcached, redis). I’ll just add some notes.

Usually, even a small web application should send some emails: errors, registration, restore password, invitations, etc.

There are 3 solutions:

• use an existing account, like gmail: the main problem - you don’t know how many emails you can send before being marked as spam
• use own mail server: need to install, configure and support
• use email service, like sendgrid, mailgun: easy to configure, provide statistics and logs, can use default http port.

For some my small projects i choosed mailgun, it provides 10000 emails in month for free, for my needs it’s more than enough and after that it’s also not expensive. For django there is a email backend django-mailgun and it takes two minutes to switch to it.

Several interesting articles I found recently. Some of them I think from Dan Bader twitter.

Django vs Flask - a detailed comparison Django vs Flask.

In most cases I preferer Django.

• It has better documentation
• There are better apps in core, with Flask you need to search for an app, compare alternatives and sometimes they are not updated for a long time
• You can choose which core apps to use
• I think it’s better developed and supported

How the heck does async/await work in Python 3.5? - a long read about async in python

Using Docker for Flask Application Development (not just Production!) - i use it the same way, the only problem I have with Python development in Docker is debugging in Intellij Idea. There is a remote interpreter, but it does not work well for me, will try it again with the latest version.

When you work on the backend part of django or flask project and there are many static files, sometimes the development server becomes slow. In this case it’s possible to use nginx as reverse proxy to serve static. I’m using nginx in docker and the configuration is quite simple.

To test some view which use cookies:

from Cookie import SimpleCookie
from django import test

class SomeTest(test.TestCase):

    def test_some_view(self):
        self.client.cookies = SimpleCookie({'test_cookie': 'test_value'})
        response = self.client.get('/some-url/')

        self.assertEqual(response.client.cookies['test_cookie'].value, 'test_value')

Here are a few notes and links after moving to the new Ubuntu server on linode.com.

Some steps for security: My First 5 Minutes On A Server

Install packages:

apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi
apt-get install postgresql postgresql-server-dev-9.1 python-dev
apt-get install mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client libmysqlclient-dev 
apt-get install git git-core

Setup virtualenv:

apt-get install python-setuptools
apt-get install python-pip
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv --no-site-packages /path/to/venv

Install PIL in virtualenv:

apt-get install libjpeg libjpeg-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev
ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so /usr/lib/
ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib/
ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib/
pip install PIL

Here, just a small example of this task. Assume you have django comments system enabled.

Then you need to add publishing of comments into redis. It can be done with comment_was_posted signal.

In one of my projects for the user profile model was used ForeignKey field.

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User, unique=True)

This leads to a lot of unnecessary queries when you want to access to related data, like:

{% raw %}
{% for item in items %}
    {{ item.user.get_profile.company }}
{% endfor %}
{% endraw %}

django_boilerplate - it’s a template to fast start new Django project.

Based on:

• django
• twitter bootstrap

Used apps:

• south - data migrations
• django-crispy-forms - for forms rendering
• django-allauth - for local and social registration, authorization
• django-debug-toolbar
• django-extensions

It also includes example app with List, Create, Update, Delete views.

Install

pip install -r requirements.txt
python manage.py syncdb

There are several possibilities to use MongoDB in Django:

• PyMongo as is
• Django MongoDB Engine
• Mongoengine
• MongoKit

Django MongoDB uses django-nonrel, which is a fork based on Django 1.3.
I don’t like this idea, because now Django 1.5 is ready to out. Beetween Mongoengine and MongoKit, I like more Mongoengine. There are several comparative articles:

• Using MongoDB in your Django app
• What’s the best MongoDB ORM for Python?

So I created a simple CRUD app using Mongoengine. The model definition in Mongoengine looks like in Django.