DEV Community: ADEMOLA OGUNMOKUN

How to connect your Django local development server to your mobile phone and test your app on your phone.

ADEMOLA OGUNMOKUN — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 06:46:41 +0000

Building a web application in Django, the developer will often use the lightweight local development server to run the code and see the changes that have been made.

However it is often useful to see how the web app is doing on a particular mobile phone.

To do that, we need to connect the phone and the computer(local machine) on the same WiFi network. With Phone as the hotspot and the computer as WiFi.

Thereafter, click on your computer WiFi settings and note the IP address used.

For this example I am using 192.168.43.167 as the WiFi IP address.

On the Django project on your computer, click on the settings.py and navigate through to the Allowed Host. Change the empty list to the IP address noted earlier.

#Settings.py

Allowed Host = ["192.168.43.167"]

Start your local development server by running

Python manage.py runserver IP:Port

For example, if the WiFi IP address noted earlier is 192.168.43.167.

Python manage.py runserver 192.168.43.167:8000

On your phone browser input the IP address and the port number into the address bar to see your app.

http://192.168.43.167:8000

How to Gitignore (untrack) files already pushed to GitHub repository.

ADEMOLA OGUNMOKUN — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 13:48:05 +0000

Most developers usually initialize the folder they are working from as their GitHub repository. However, some files or/and directories may be present in that folder that you would not want to push to GitHub (files such as database, environment variables etc.)

Adding the file(s) or directories to gitignore seems to solve the issue. However, sometimes, you might have unknowingly pushed that file(s) to our GitHub repository failing or forgetting to gitignore the file(s) we did not want to push to the remote repository.

Once the file has been pushed, adding it to gitignore afterwards would not untrack the file from that commit. The file would still be present in the repository.

If you have that kind of issue, follow these simple five steps to solve the problem.

Step 1:

Git commit

Make sure the changes you have made on the projects have been added and committed, including the .gitignore file.

Do this by

git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"

Step 2:

Remove all the files in the repository.

You do that by:

git rm -r --cached .

rm is the remove command, adding -cached allow us to remove the files from the index. Our files are still present.

Step 3:

Add everything

The next step is to re-add/track our files. By doing this, the files in the . gitignore file will not be tracked.

This is done by:

git add .

Step 4:

Commit the changes.

Thus, let's commit our changes by

git commit -m "gitignore fix"

Step 5:

Push to GitHub

After we are through with everything, we still need to push it to our online GitHub repository by

git push

Thanks for reading.

Basics of openpyxl : A Python module for Excel files

ADEMOLA OGUNMOKUN — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:19:57 +0000

This is an introduction to openpyxl, a Python module built for reading and writing Excel document files.
Most often, we would like to automate many of our repetitive tasks on Excel using a programming language.

Python's openpyxl module makes it very easy for us to access an excel file.
Note that Openpyxl is not a built-in module, therefore we need to install it first.

Installing Openpyxl

Run the following code in your Python terminal to install Openpyxl.

Pip install openpyxl

The above code installs the openpyxl module after a few minutes.
To use the openpyxl on our in python, we need to import it.

import openpyxl

Loading our excel file can be done by:

from openpyxl import load_workbook
survey = load_workbook("ourworkbook.xlsx")

The code above uses the imported load_workbook method to read the excel file of interest and stores it in variable "survey"
Note that the file we are accessing must be in the same folder we are working from.

Excel document can contain many sheets, to print all the active sheets in the excel file .

 print(survey.sheetnames)

The above code will display the name of the active sheets in the excel files.
To access the first sheet in the document:

 first = survey.active

We stored the first sheet in the excel document as variable "first"

Rows and columns in excel file

Accessing column A:

col_A = first["A"]
col_A

To access range of columns:

range_A_to_C = first["A:C"]
print(range_A_to_C)

The range of columns from A to C is stored in the variable "range_A_to_C" as it is shown in the above code, we can thus print it out.

There are quite few nice things we can do with the Openpyxl module in Python, and interested person should check Openpyxl documentation for more information.

Openpyxl has been around for quite some time now and has its own usefulness. However, better tools (eg. pandas) has been developed in Python for better handling of Excel file.