Django projects contain a predefined structure with some key files, and they are composed of one or more apps.
To create a Django project, see [[Install Django and start a new project]].
After created, we can see the project folder is moviereviews, look into the folder with tree command:
$ cd moviereviews
moviereviews/$ tree
.
├── db.sqlite3
├── manage.py
└── moviereviews
├── asgi.py
├── __init__.py
├── __pycache__
│ ├── __init__.cpython-312.pyc
│ ├── settings.cpython-312.pyc
│ ├── urls.cpython-312.pyc
│ └── wsgi.cpython-312.pyc
├── settings.py
├── urls.py
└── wsgi.py
2 directories, 11 files
Rename the project folder name
As we can see, there is a folder with the same name as the project folder moviereviews. To avoid confusion and to distinguish between the two folders, we can keep the inner folder as it is and rename the outer folder with an suffix, like moviereviewsproject.
Contents of Django project folder
The manage.py file helps us to perform administrative operations. For example, we can start the local dev server with python manage.py runserver or create a new app with python manage.py startapp. We should not tinker with this file.
The db.sqlite3 file contains our database.
Contents of folder moviereviewsproject/moviereviews
__pycache__: This folder stores compiled bytecodes, can we ignore this folder.__init__.py: This file specifies what to run when Django launches for the first time.wsgi.py: This file stands for the Web Server Gateway Interface(WSGI) and helps Django server our web pages.asgi.py: This file allows an optional Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface(ASGI) to run.urls.py: This file tells Django which pages to render in response to a browser or URL request.settings.py: This file controls our project’s settings. It contains several properties, see [[Basic settings of Django project]].
To create Django apps, see [[Create an app in a Django project]].