www. to the bare domainIf you’re hosting a website on a top level domain, you should set up both the bare domain (example.com) and the “www” subdomain (www.example.com). People expect to be able to type either version and see your site - no matter which version you advertise.
I’ve just moved all my open source repositories from using plain pip to python -m pip, in test scripts and documentation.
When you run Django’s manage.py makemigrations, it will try to generate a name for the migration based upon its contents. For example, if you are adding a single field, it will call the migration 0002_mymodel_myfield.py. However when your migration contains more than one step, it instead uses a simple ‘auto’ name with the current date + time, e.g. 0002_auto_20200113_1837.py. You can provide the -n/--name argument to makemigrations, but developers often forget this.
Django templates are often used to pass data to JavaScript code. Unfortunately, if implemented incorrectly, this opens up the possibility of HTML injection, and thus XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attacks.
I previously blogged about how I configured my CloudFront hosted website to score A+ on securityheaders.com. I worked around CloudFront’s lack of an “add headers” feature by adding a Lambda@Edge function in JavaScript.
robots.txt is a standard file to communicate to “robot” crawlers, such as Google’s Googlebot, which pages they should not crawl. You serve it on your site at the root URL /robots.txt, for example https://example.com/robots.txt.
Here’s a little Python problem I encountered recently.
Django provides MySQL and MariaDB support out of the box. It supports the mysqlclient library as its DB API driver to connect.
Here are some issues I’ve seen crop up several times in Django projects using Celery. They probably apply with other task queues, I simply haven’t used them so much.
I previously covered how I scored A+ for security headers on my site, which uses AWS CloudFront. I didn’t touch on scoring A+ for your TLS configuration though.
git diffOnce in a while, I have to make a change to many or all of my blog posts. For example, implementing opengraph meta tags.
One of the headline features of Django 3.0 is its Enumerations for model field choices. They’re a nicer way of defining and constraining model Field.choices.
This post is a PSA on the somewhat unintuitive way Field.choices works in Django.
SyntaxWarning: "is" with a literalTake this reasonable-looking code:
On Wednesday evening last week I held a quiz at the January London Django Meetup Group. This was the fourth quiz, which has become an annual Christmas tradition at the meetup. Unfortunately it was a month late this year due to venue changes, so I’ve titled this post “Django Quiz 4”.
I recently add a pre-flight check to a devops project to ensure that all commits from the Git repository’s origin/master are present locally. This is to guard against developers accidentally reverting others’ deployed changes.
Here’s a hint I have found myself repeating in code review. I learnt this from my university lecturer Tony Field, who probably repeated it in every lecture! He was teaching us Haskell, but it applies to Python, and most other programming languages.
If you use Django’s test runner, you’ll probably have encountered this message:
Bruno Oliveira, known for his work on the pytest project, tweeted this thread last July:
pytest is quickly becoming the “standard” Python testing framework. However it can be overwhelming to new users.
Take this code:
My site is static HTML, built with Jekyll (more details in my colophon). This means I have a folder that contains the whole site in HTML files.
I’ve recently been running low on disk space on my laptop. I’ve freed some by removing files, but I’ve also been looking for ways to save space through compression.
Several large Django applications that I’ve worked on ended up with memory leaks at some point. The Python processes slowly increased their memory consumption until crashing. Not fun. Even with automatic restart of the process, there was still some downtime.
Django 3.0 alpha 1 came out this week. It introduces ASGI support thanks to lots of hard work by Andrew Godwin.