Create your first Lino site¶
Create your first Lino site¶
Run getlino startsite
to create a first site:
$ getlino startsite noi first
You may replace the name noi
in above command by other names.
The available choices are listed in List of known Lino applications.
Run runserver
:
$ cd ~/lino/lino_local/first
$ python manage.py runserver
Now start your browser, point it to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and you should see something like this:

Congratulations! Enjoy the first Lino site running on your machine!
Project directories¶
- ~/lino/lino_local¶
This is your projects root, the directory that will hold all the Lino sites
on your computer. Every new Lino site created with getlino startsite
will be a directory below this one.
- ~/lino/lino_local/first¶
This is the Django project directory of the first site you created in Install your Lino developer environment. Usually there is one Django project directory for every Lino site. (An exception to that rule is a site with multiple front ends, you may leave this for later).
Lino project directories are not very big, and you will hopefully create many such projects and want to keep a backup of them.
The settings.py
file¶
Your first settings.py
file should look as follows:
from lino_book.projects.min2.settings import *
SITE = Site(globals(), title="My Lino site")
DEBUG = True
Explanations:
lino_book.projects.min2
is one of the demo projects included in the Developer Guide. Actually it is the second of a series of projects documented in The Lino Minimal projects.We import these settings directly into our global namespace using the wildcard
*
. This is necessary because that's how Django wants settings.Then comes the trick that turns your Django project into a Lino application:
SITE = Site(globals(), ...)
That is, you instantiate a
Site
class and store this object asSITE
in your Django settings. This line will automatically install default values for all required Django settings (e.g.DATABASES
andLOGGING
) into your global namespace.
You might add DEBUG = True
or other settings of your choice
after these two lines, but it is not necessary here.
There are two possibilities to override the Site
attributes. The most
basic way is:
from lino_book.projects.chatter.settings import *
SITE = Site(globals(), title="My Lino site", is_demo_site=False, languages="en fr")
DEBUG = True
The more explicit way is this:
from lino_book.projects.chatter.settings import *
class Site(Site):
title = "My Lino site"
is_demo_site = False
languages = "en fr"
SITE = Site(globals())
DEBUG = True
This way is recommended on production sites because it
allows to override methods as well. Yes, Lino saves us not only from having to
define all-uppercase settings, it also adds the full power of the Puython
language to your settings.py
file. More about this in
The local settings.py file.
The manage.py
file¶
The manage.py
file should have the following content:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import sys
if __name__ == "__main__":
os.environ["DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE"] = "settings"
from lino.core.management import execute_from_command_line
execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
A manage.py
file does two things: it sets the
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
environment variable and then calls Django's
execute_from_command_line
function.
Actually a Lino site calls
lino.core.management.execute_from_command_line()
, a wrapper around
Django's original. It adds functionality for automatically running asynchronously when use_linod
Loading initial data into your database¶
Next we create your database and populate it with some demo content. With a Lino application this is easier than with a plain Django project, it is just one command to type:
$ python manage.py prep
The pm prep
command is a custom django-admin command
provided by Lino. It is just a thin wrapper that calls initdb
with
the application's Demo fixtures as argument. It will ask you:
INFO Started manage.py prep (using settings) --> PID 28463
We are going to flush your database (.../default.db).
Are you sure (y/n) ?
If you answer "y" here, then Lino will delete everything in the given
database and replace it with its "factory default" demo data. Yes,
that's what we want. So go on and type y
.
The output that follows should look like this:
>>> shell("python manage.py prep --noinput")
...
`initdb std demo demo2` started on database .../hello/default.db.
Operations to perform:
Synchronize unmigrated apps: about, bootstrap3, cal, checkdata, contacts, countries, export_excel, extjs, gfks, jinja, lino, office, printing, staticfiles, system, users, xl
Apply all migrations: contenttypes, sessions
Synchronizing apps without migrations:
Creating tables...
Creating table system_siteconfig
Creating table users_user
Creating table users_authority
Creating table countries_country
Creating table countries_place
Creating table contacts_partner
Creating table contacts_person
Creating table contacts_companytype
Creating table contacts_company
Creating table contacts_roletype
Creating table contacts_role
Creating table checkdata_message
Creating table cal_remotecalendar
Creating table cal_room
Creating table cal_eventtype
Creating table cal_guestrole
Creating table cal_calendar
Creating table cal_subscription
Creating table cal_task
Creating table cal_eventpolicy
Creating table cal_entryrepeater
Creating table cal_recurrentevent
Creating table cal_event
Creating table cal_guest
Running deferred SQL...
Running migrations:
Applying contenttypes.0001_initial... OK
Applying contenttypes.0002_remove_content_type_name... OK
Applying sessions.0001_initial... OK
Loading data from .../lino_xl/lib/contacts/fixtures/std.py
Loading data from .../lino_xl/lib/cal/fixtures/std.py
Loading data from .../lino/modlib/users/fixtures/demo.py
Loading data from .../lino_xl/lib/countries/fixtures/demo.py
Loading data from .../lino_xl/lib/contacts/fixtures/demo.py
Loading data from .../lino_xl/lib/cal/fixtures/demo.py
Loading data from .../lino/modlib/users/fixtures/demo2.py
Loading data from .../lino_xl/lib/cal/fixtures/demo2.py
Installed ... object(s) from ... fixture(s)
Lino applications make abundant use of what we call Python fixtures in order to have a rich set of "demo data". We will come back to this in The initdb command.
Visualizing database content from the command-line¶
The runserver
command starts a web server and lets you
interact with the database through the web interface. But Django also
offers a shell
interface.
We will come back to this later, for the moment just try the following.
You can visualize the content of your database from the command-line
without starting a web server using Lino's show
command.
For example to see the list of countries, you can write:
>>> shell("python manage.py show countries.Countries")
...
============================= ==========
Designation ISO code
----------------------------- ----------
Bangladesh BD
Belgium BE
Congo (Democratic Republic) CD
Estonia EE
France FR
Germany DE
Maroc MA
Netherlands NL
Russia RU
============================= ==========
Exercises¶
You can now play around by changing things in your project.
In your
settings.py
file, replacelino_book.projects.min2
bylino_book.projects.polly
. Run python manage.py prep followed by python manage.py runserver. Log in and play around.Same as previous, but with
lino_book.projects.chatter
Write three descriptions (e.g. in LibreOffice .odt format), one for each of the applications you just saw: what it can do, what are the features, what functionalities are missing. Use screenshots. Use a language that can be understood by non-programmers. Send these documents to your mentor.
Read the documentation about the following Site attributes and try to change them:
Checkpoint¶
If you follow an internship, you should now have a meeting with your mentor and show him what you learned so far. You'll get a badge to certify your progress.
Glossary¶
- Django project directory¶
A directory that contains a runnable Django project. It contains the files necessary for that specific instance of a given Lino application.