Django Learning Day 17

#devjournal #django #learning #discuss

🚀 Django Learning Journey – Day 17

Today was not the smoothest day health-wise, but I promised myself one thing: no two consecutive days without touching code.
So even with low energy, I showed up — and even the “basic setup” taught me something valuable.

⚠️ The CommandError Lesson

I started by creating my new Django app…
and instantly faced a CommandError.

Why?
Because I named my app “authentication” — which is already a Python module.

Django simply said:
❌ “You cannot use built-in module names as app names.”

It caught me off guard, but taught me an important rule:
✨ Never use existing Python module names as your app name.

How many of you fell into the same trap?
Tell me I’m not alone! 😄

📦 Best Practice Repeated: Requirements Setup

From my previous project, I continued the same practice:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Every time I start a new project, this has already become a habit — and a really helpful one.

❓ Curious Question #1 — Linking URLs for Multiple Apps

Now that I’m building an authentication system as a separate app, I have one question for the community:

🧭 What is the best way to structure URLs when you have multiple Django apps?
Especially for something like an “auth” app?

Should we:

Create a urls.py inside every app?

Or keep everything inside the main project urls.py?

Or include each app's URLs with path("auth/", include("auth_app.urls"))?

Would love to hear how you all manage this in real-world projects!

❓ Curious Question #2 — External Databases on Render

Since I deployed my first project on Render, I’m curious:

📌 How do you connect Render apps to external databases like PostgreSQL?
Do you configure them in environment variables?
Or use Render’s built-in PostgreSQL service?

Any tips or gotchas to watch out for?

❤️ Signing Off

Not the most productive day in terms of coding…
But a huge win in terms of consistency and learning.

Even on slow days, the journey continues.
Tomorrow, I hope to pick up more momentum and dive deeper into building the authentication workflow.

Let me know your thoughts or suggestions — always eager to learn from this wonderful community!

Top comments (7)

Prodigius • Dec 15

Good stuff! Glad to see others are learning Django these days. We use it where I work and I use it for all of my web projects. I'll answer some of your questions from my own experience:

Never use existing Python module names as your app name.
How many of you fell into the same trap?

Everyone has done this and I still do it on occasion. :D

pip freeze > requirements.txt : Absolutely. In fact, I would recommend looking into poetry as a dependency management system. Pip freeze doesn't handle dependency management side but is fine for now and definitely helpful of keeping track of packages in your system.

What is the best way to structure URLs when you have multiple Django apps?
Especially for something like an “auth” app?

Should we:

Create a urls.py inside every app?

Yes if you have views in the app. Not every app will but you definitely should. You should also use namespaces:

app_name = 'core'

So that later you can do {% url 'core.index' %}. It makes it easier to keep track of and separate the concerns.

As far as Render goes, I assume that's some kind of deployment service. I self-host. I either set them up old school style (install into nginx and use gunicorn) or use Docker or Kubernetes. I would recommend learning on these things next (as in down the road whenever you're ready) so that you can become a FULL stack engineer (not just full stack dev).

Anyways, I hope this is helpful. If not, feel free to just ignore it lol.