Django Sawhorse

Sawhorse is an installable Django project intended to be used in the development of “standalone” Django apps. It is designed to eliminate the need to create an “example project” which is used only in the development of the app. It is the “example project” for any app. Requires virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper.

Quick Start

  1. Add export SAWHORSE_HOME=$HOME/projects to your shell startup file (modify the path to your desired location). Sawhorse will create a subdirectory in this location for every app that you use with it. This is similar to the way WORKON_HOME works in virtualenvwrapper (which you should be using anyway, especially since Sawhorse requires it). Sawhorse will add items here needed to run the app: SQLite database, media root, and static root.

  2. Use pip to install Sawhorse into the development virtualenv for an app. For now, the best way to do this is to install directly from GitHub:

    pip install git+https://github.com/jlecker/django-sawhorse.git

  3. That’s it! You may now run Django management commands by using sawhorse-manage.py, like so:

    sawhorse-manage.py runserver

    If everything is working correctly, you should be able to run tests, run the development server, and run other commands to get right to work.

    NOTE: sawhorse-manage.py expects your app to have the same name as the active virtualenv, and it expects to be able to import it. The easiest way to guarantee this is to run sawhorse-manage.py in the parent directory of the app package (so it can be found in the current directory).

Additional Considerations

If your app has settings which are required to run out-of-the-box, they can be placed in the module required_settings.py. This can be placed anywhere it can be imported, but the recommended location is in the parent directory of the app package (where it will be found if you are also running sawhorse-manage.py there, as recommended).

The required_settings.py module can be kept with your app so that it can be easily run with Sawhorse, but if your app also requires API keys or other “secret” settings, they can be placed in the module local_settings.py in the same directory. Presumably you would NOT keep this file with the app, so make sure any such settings requirements are well-documented elsewhere.