Creating the official Django Polls app Part 8

Saturday, January 11, 2025 at 12:14 AM | 4 min read

Last modified on Saturday, January 11, 2025 at 7:54 PM

#fullstack development, #macOS, #django, #python3, #django commons, #django debug toolbar, #django settings, #pip, #series, #third party packages, #tutorial

A yawning Carpet Python

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Table of Contents

Now we'll become acquainted with third-party packages. One of Django’s appealing features is their rich ecosystem of third-party packages. They’re community developed packages that can be used to quickly add new features to an application.

We will learn how to add the Django Debug Toolbar, which is a commonly used third party package. The Django Debug Toolbar has ranked in the top three most used third-party packages in the Django Developers Survey in recent years.

Installing Django Debug Toolbar

The Django Debug Toolbar is a useful tool for debugging Django applications. It’s a third-party package that is maintained by the community organization Django Commons. The toolbar helps us understand how our application functions and to identify problems. It does so by providing panels that provide debug information about the current request and response.

To install a third-party application like the toolbar, we need to install the package by running the below command within an activated virtual environment. This is similar to our earlier step for installing Django:

pip install django-debug-toolbar

Then, as before, we run the following command to add django-debug-toolbar to our requirements.txt:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

After running pip freeze > requirements.txt, we also have to add the package to our INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ... all other apps
    'debug_toolbar',
]

Then we have to add the Debug Toolbar middleware to our MIDDLEWARE setting in settings.py:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    # ... all other middleware
    'debug_toolbar.middleware.DebugToolbarMiddleware',
]

Then we have to configure an INTERNAL_IPS in settings.py to allow the toolbar to be displayed (typically set to '127.0.0.1'):

INTERNAL_IPS = [
    '127.0.0.1',
]

Then we have to add the following to django_polls/urls.py:

import debug_toolbar

urlpatterns = [
    path('polls/', include('polls.urls')),
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('__debug__/', include(debug_toolbar.urls)),
]

The above configuration is not from the official Django Debug Toolbar documentation. Their way differs slightly. The only place where it differs is in urls.py.

# django_polls/urls.py
rom debug_toolbar.toolbar import debug_toolbar_urls

urlpatterns = [
    # ... the rest of your URLconf goes here ...
] + debug_toolbar_urls()

Either way works. Django Debug Toolbar's approach follows the configuration convention for development environments. We do something similar when configuring static files for development, specifically media (images) files.

If you want to learn more about Django Debug Toolbars, visit their documentation entitled Django Debug Toolbar Installation.

Customizing the toolbar

We can further configure the toolbar by using the DEBUG_TOOLBAR_CONFIG setting. We can refer to the documentation for the available options.

Running our project in the browser

Next, we can start our Django development server and access our website in a browser. If we're accessing the site from an allowed IP address (as specified in INTERNAL_IPS), we should see the debug toolbar on the page.

When I visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/polls/, the browser window looks like the following:

Adding the django debug toolbar

Adding the django debug toolbar

Wherever I go on the site, the django debug toolbar appears.

We also should be able to see the DjDT “handle” on the right side of the browser window when we browse to http://localhost:8000/admin/. We can click it to open the debug toolbar and use the tools in each panel. We can view the panels documentation page for more information on what the panels show.

When I went into my admin interface in the browser, it looked like the following:

Admin interface including Django Debug Toolbar

Admin interface including Django Debug Toolbar

When I clicked on "Hide" to the top right of the browser window, the following appeared:

Appearance of the DJDT box

Appearance of the DJDT box

When I clicked on the DJDT box, the Django Debug Toolbar reappeared.

Installing other third-party packages

There are many more third-party packages which we can find using the Django resource Django Packages.

It can be hard to choose which third-party packages we should use. It really depends on our needs and objectives. Sometimes it’s okay to use a package that’s in alpha stage. Sometimes we need to know if it’s production ready. Adam Johnson (who's written a lot of great articles on Django development) has a blog post regarding what qualifies a package as “well maintained” entitled The Well-Maintained Test: 12 Questions for New Dependencies. Django Packages shows data for some characteristics, such as when a package was last updated.

According to Writing your first Django app, part 8,

As Adam points out in his post, when the answer to one of the questions is “no”, that’s an opportunity to contribute.

If you want to see what Django suggests for next steps, please visit Writing your first Django app, part 8 and go down to the section entitled "What's next?".

The next (advanced) tutorial suggested by Django after this one is entitled How to write reusable apps. I know I will be checking it out to see if there is anything I haven't yet learned. I also have a series here on the site entitled "How to create a fullstack application using Django and Python" in which we write reusable apps. If you want to learn more, please visit How to create a fullstack application using Django and Python Table of Contents. I still have a couple of more sections to write in order to complete the series, but 33 sections have already been completed. By the time you get to 34, it and the rest will already have been published. Check it out!

Code associated with this post

To view the code associated with this post, please visit d231e4e.

Conclusion

In this section, we installed the Django Debug Toolbar, configured the toolbar so it would appear in the browser when we ran our development server, learned that we can customize the toolbar, ran our Django Polls project in the browser to view the toolbar, were introduced to resources where we could access other third party packages to use in our applications, and were provided with next steps.