Create a View

Something to note here: When I was building out this new view, I wasn’t getting the same error messages in my browser, I was seeing a PageNotFound error instead.

After getting to know this “friend” a little better I realized that I had the wrong url in my address bar. I was still at the home page of http://127.0.0.1:8000/instead of where Martin was actually at, which was http://127.0.0.1:8000/projects/

Awesome, great job figuring this out @Paul and thanks for posting here. There’s always something to learn when you get to know your friends better ;)

Hello Martin,

On that note, is there a way for us to resolve the ‘Page not found’ friend when we just go to 127.0.0.1:8000/?

Yes, there’s a way to do that–you’ll have to create a urlpattern for the empty path / (without anything after) and write a view that handles that path and returns something.

As you don’t have anything defined for the empty path, it can’t find the page and tells you, quite literally: Page not found.

hello martin would it be alright to create all both my apps and projects in my virtual enviroment folder?? i seem to have created it there and everything works fine for now

@oladelealade I suggest to keep (or move) your apps and projects folders outside of the venv folder. One reason is that you might want to .gitignore your virtual environment folder before committing to version control, and then you couldn’t add any project code.

I suggest to aim for the following structure:

rp-portfolio
├── .env/
├── manage.py
├── portfolio/
└── projects/

I got the two urls.py files mixed up. Fixed now 😀

Well done @Ekundayo Blessing! :)

For whatever reason, my “projects” app already had a views.py so I didnt get the same errors. Here is what it contains currently:

from django.shortcuts import render
from projects.models import Project


# Create your views here.
def all_projects(request):
    # query the db to return all project objects
    projects = Project.objects.all()
    return render(request, 'projects/all_projects.html',
                  {'projects': projects})


def project_detail(request, pk):
    project = Project.objects.get(pk=pk)
    return render(request, 'projects/detail.html',
                  {'project': project})

I’m going to omit the steps and make no changes yet.

Hi @Brandy Wright. If you downloaded the .zip file you get the complete code of the finished project. If you want to build it alongside the course, which is what I suggest in order to get the maximum learning benefit, then you should build the project from scratch. Think of the .zip file just as a reference project you can look up stuff if you get stuck.

Absolutely loving your clear and well explanation of django URLs…anywhere else I was not sure of the logic, I am so grateful of you @Martin Breuss.

Regarding the UnresolvedReference PyCharm to give some hints, but is there any other way to find out more about!

Hi Martin, I am following along your steps. I am getting this error message.

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: WSGI application ‘portfolio.wsgi.application’ could not be loaded; Error importing module.

Disregard my previous question. I was able to fix it. Thanks.

Oaky, I did not see “Hello, everyone!” on your django.

Hi @Andrew. Check out the video around 5:30, which is where it shows how “Hello everyone!” gets displayed after passing the text to the HttpResponse() object.

npujari, I wish you had posted your solution. I’m hitting the same problem.

The cause appears to be the 'projects' line we added to MIDDLEWARE in settings.py. The causing error is:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/sdg/Code/django-portfolio/.dp/lib/python3.7/site-packages/django/utils/module_loading.py", line 13, in import_string module_path, class_name = dotted_path.rsplit('.', 1) ValueError: not enough values to unpack (expected 2, got 1)

Following shortly thereafter is:

File "/Users/sdg/Code/django-portfolio/.dp/lib/python3.7/site-packages/django/utils/module_loading.py", line 15, in import_string raise ImportError("%s doesn't look like a module path" % dotted_path) from err ImportError: projects doesn't look like a module path

It seems to want a dotted value like foo.bar instead of simply projects. I can take projects out of MIDDLEWARE and get the previous expected error, no problem. Any clues?

Perhaps I missed something. I’ll go back and review the previous two videos.

Many thanks for any help!

Ha! Posting publicly always makes the solution jump out! :-)

For future reference for anyone else who hits this error: put the line 'projects', in the INSTALLED_APPS list in settings.py, not the MIDDLEWARE list!

(Is there a facepalm emoji…?)

There is! 🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♂️ 😁

Thanks so much for posting your solution, as you noticed and mentioned, it can really help other learners down the road 👍

And great job figuring it out. It also helps me a lot when I write out a question for a post, often the solution comes along the way.

Well done!!

I don’t know whether it is a change from Django2 to Django3 but I had to swap the line:

urlpatterns = [
    path('/', views.project_list),
]

to

urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.project_list),
]

Hi @iwatts and thanks for noting this. I just went to double-check and having the / in your empty path does prevent it from loading correctly, both on Django 3 as well as Django 2.2.16, so there’s no change regarding the Django version, but it just doesn’t work.

So let’s explore this a bit more :)

Reproducing the Error

I gave it a spin with a small contrived example project, where I set the urlpatterns like so:

urlpatterns = [
    path('/', views.index),
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

And here’s the error message that Django sent me as a response when trying to access the base URL at http://127.0.0.1:8000/ as well as http://127.0.0.1:8000:

Page not found (404)
Request Method: GET
Request URL:    http://127.0.0.1:8000/

Using the URLconf defined in mysite.urls, Django tried
these URL patterns, in this order:

/
admin/

The empty path didn't match any of these.

Django’s feedback in this case is maybe slightly confusing, but it’s really all in there. :) Django is telling us that it looked at the two existing path configurations, / and admin/, but that The empty path didn’t match any of these.

The Empty Path

When you go to a URL, such as http://127.0.0.1:8000/, the / at the end isn’t a text part of the URL. Instead it has the meaning that it separates URL path components.

Django knows that and strips these off, and doesn’t consider them as part of a path component that you are defining in your path() calls.

Which means that if you type http://127.0.0.1:8000/, Django receives as a string component to process further only the stuff that comes after the final /. In this case, that is nothing, or rather, an empty string ''.

A Hacky Experiment

So what would you need to do in order to match a path configuration that looks like this:

path('/', views.index)

What URL would you need to type into your browser to make Django match it? Give it a try and report back here :)

Yeah - just tried it and you need:

127.0.0.1:8000/projects//

I just presumed it was all a string - good to know :-)

Nice! Good work! 🙌 :)

And just as a conclusion for anyone reading this down the road: Don’t put the slash character into your empty path, just leave it as an empty string instead:

path('', views.index)

I made it to this part, but am getting an error not sure how to fix.

When I enter:

python manage.py runserver

I get this error:

 File "C:\PYTHON-TRAIN\zoo\django-portfolio\portfolio\urls.py", line 21, in <module>
    path('projects/', include(projects.urls)),
NameError: name 'projects' is not defined

Here is the code I have in the portfolio\urls.py file:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import include, path

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/',    admin.site.urls),
    path('projects/', include(projects.urls)),
    ]

@KatMac What’s your directory tree? Is there a projects folder in your django-portfolio/ parent directory? Perhaps, you misspelled the name project without the s at the end?

It was a typo. Sorry to bother you on that.

The settings.py file in django 4.0.6 uses from pathlib import Path, not import os like in the tutorial. How can I resolve this issue?

@gerlachtatras Django 4.0.6 seems to be working just fine when the path in your settings file is defined the old way with the os module. However, if it bothers you, then you can manually edit the settings.py file in your manaement app by replacing the BASE_DIR constant and updating all of its references, for example:

# settings.py

from pathlib import Path

# Build paths inside the project like this: BASE_DIR / 'subdir'.
BASE_DIR = Path(__file__).resolve().parent.parent

# ...

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [BASE_DIR / 'projects/templates'],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
                'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
            ],
        },
    },
]

i am creating a new app called booking, i have checked the management urls and app urls, and still getting this error -

Page not found (404) Request Method: GET Request URL: 127.0.0.1:8000/booking Using the URLconf defined in djangoProject.urls, Django tried these URL patterns, in this order:

admin/ booking/ The current path, booking, didn’t match any of these.

code from management urls.py (djangoProject)

from django.contrib import admin from django.urls import include, path

urlpatterns = [ path(‘admin/’, admin.site.urls), path(‘booking/’, include(‘booking.urls’)), ]

code from app, booking

from django.urls import path from booking import views

urlpatterns = [ path(’ ‘, views.booking_view), ]

i dont know what i am doing wring, i have checked and checked, cant see why i still have htis error

I was not getting the same error message at the end of this video, but a 404 instead. Took me 15 minutes to realize that I simplly forgot to include the forward slash after the word ‘projects’ when assigning the path in portfolio.urls :)