Chapter 16: Geodjango

What is geodjango?

Geodjango is a python module for developing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications. A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer system that analyzes and displays geographically referenced information. It uses data that is attached to a unique location.

Geodjango enables us to create geographic web applications using the Django framework.

Create a new Django project

Because Geodjango is a stand alone framework just like Django, and even though we could apply it in our sanitation project, we prefer to start on a clean slate this time round.

Startup wsl2 again and create a new directory called my_geodjango.

mkdir my_geodjango/

Get into that directory via cd my_geodjango/.

Open that directory in vs code by typing code ..

Create a virtual environment

First things first. Let's create a virtual environment. If you've followed us from Chapter 1 so far, you know that a virtual environment is important in containerizing our project and preventing conflicts due to disparate packages across projects.

python3 -m venv venv

Now let's activate this virtual environment.

source venv/bin/activate

You should now see your placeholder name appended with (venv) next to it.

Installing Django

Now let's install the motherboard for our project, the Django framework.

pip install Django

Create Django project

Now let's create our Geodjango project called agriculture.

django-admin startproject agriculture .

Note the dot (.). The period (.) prevents Django from creating a nested directory. That is, it prevents Django from creating another directory called agriculture within the agriculture directory. This is what happened the first time when we were creating the sanitation project in Chapter 1.

I personally prefer this second approach since it keeps my folders tidy.

my_geodjango
├── agriculture
│   ├── --snip --
│   
├── venv
│   ├── -- snip --

Now let's test if our agriculture Django project is working by instantiating the server.

python3 manage.py runserver

Good.

Create the geolocations app

We will create an app called geolocations that will be used to collect our geographic coordinates. This is the app that we will be reliant on the Geodjango framework.

python3 manage.py startapp geolocations

A new folder called geolocations should appear.

In the settings.py file of your agriculture/ directory, go to the INSTALLED_APPS variable and add the geolocations app.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # my apps
    'geolocations',

    #
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
]