Quick guide to installing Django framework on Windows

djangoDjango is a dev framework for building web apps that uses Python. It has many great features (db api, auto admin interface, templates, cache framework, etc.). Installing the framework on Windows take a few steps to get going and has a few prerequisites. The below steps assume you don’t have Python or Django currently installed. This guide was created on Windows 7 (64 bit). Now let’s get to it:

  1. Download Python: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.3.3/
  2. Install Python (to c:\python)
  3. Go to the pip download area: http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/installing.html#using-the-installer
  4. Right click, download / save ez_setup.py to c:\python
  5. In cmd prompt: cd\python
  6. Run: python.exe ez_setup.py
  7. From the same link, download get-pip.py
  8. In the cmd prompt, run python.exe get-pip.py
  9. When finished, in cmd, navigate to: \python\scripts  (where pip lives now)
  10. Now run pip install Django
  11. To see if Django was installed correctly, at a cmd prompt run:
    python -c “import django; print(django.get_version())”
    This should return 1.6.1 (or similar).
  12. Add c:\python\scripts to your windows environment path
  13. Close / reopen a cmd prompt (to reflect the addition to your PATH variable)
  14. Now you can navigate to any folder (ie: c:\projects) and run:
    django-admin.py startproject thenextbigidea
  15. Your project was created! To test:
  16. Navigate to c:\projects\thenextbigidea and run:
    python manage.py runserver
  17. In your browser, visit: http://localhost:8000/

So that’s just the start. Visit https://docs.djangoproject.com to continue your journey!

Quick guide to installing Django framework on Windows