Exercise - Create paths and views

  • 7 minutes

With our app structure created, we can begin to take the steps to add our own custom code. We'll create a view and then register a path inside a URLconf.

Create the view

  1. Inside Visual Studio Code, open views.py, which will be inside hello_world.

  2. Replace the code inside views.py with the following code:

    from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse

def index(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello, world!")

    The helper function HttpResponse allows you to return text or other primitive types to the caller.

    Note

    When you open views.py, you might receive a message from Visual Studio Code that prompts you to install PyLint. If you receive this message, select Install PyLint.

Create the route

With the view created, the next step is to map it to the appropriate URL, or path.

  1. Inside Visual Studio Code, create a file in hello_world named urls.py.

  2. Add the following code to the new urls.py.

    from django.urls import path
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.index, name='index'),
]

The most important part of this code is the urlpatterns tuple. This tuple is where the views and URLs are connected or mapped. As you can see, we've imported our views.py file so we can use it within the urlpatterns line.

Register our URLconf with the project

Our newly created URLconf is inside our hello_world application. Because the project controls all user requests, we need to register our URLconf in the core urls.py file, which is inside helloproject.

  1. Open urls.py inside helloproject.

  2. Note the doc comments at the beginning. These comments explain how you can register new URLconf modules.

  3. Replace the line that reads from django.urls import path with the following import statement to add include and path.

    from django.urls import include, path

    Using include allows us to import URLconf modules, and path is used to identify the root for the URLconf.

  4. Inside the list, underneath the line that reads urlpatterns = [, add the following code:

    path('', include('hello_world.urls')),

    This code registers our URLconf.

The code underneath the doc comment should now look like the following sample:

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

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

Run your first app

The structure is complete, views were added, and the URLs were mapped. Now it's time to run your app!

  1. Inside the terminal window in Visual Studio Code, run the following command to start the server again.

    python manage.py runserver

  2. Open the URL in your preferred browser:

    http://localhost:8000/

You should now see Hello, world! in your browser window. Congratulations! You've created your first Django application.