Challenge goal: The idea of the challenge is to implement a very simplified version of Reddit, meaning you will have Users, Topics, Posts and Comments. with this you're expected to test your knowledge on the basic concepts involved in a Django backend application, and to also learn even more. Always!
Target level: This is an entry level course, no prior knowledge of programming is needed.
Final accomplishment: By the end of this challenge, you’ll be able to understand the basics of Django and how to create your own RESTful API with basic CRUD functionalities.
- Separate your project into 4 Django apps, one for each entity:
- User
- Topic
- Post
- Comment
- Have all the required fields for each entity as described on this README
- Use the URL structure described on this README with Nested URL Routers
-
Create the virtual environment and activate it
virtualenv -p python3 venv source venv/bin/activate -
Install the requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt -
Start the dockers
docker-compose upwith the database and the localstack -
Run the server with
python manage.py runserver 8000
You need a .envfile with your environment variables, here's an example file:
LOAD_ENVS_FROM_FILE='True'
ENVIRONMENT='development'
SECRET_KEY='#*=backend-challenge=*#'
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL='Challenge <[email protected]>'
DATABASE_URL='postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/backend-challenge-001'
SENTRY_DSN='sentry_key'
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME='django-be'
Here are some useful stuff to keep in mind while completing this challenge:
- Try to keep your code DRY, so the creation of abstract helper models is more than welcome to avoid repetition of fields in your models
- Remember that only the author of a topic, post or comment should be able to modify or delete it! If you have any doubts, check the Authentication and Permissions part on the Django REST tutorial
- For better structuring and visualization, you may use Nested Serializers to customize your responses beyond the primary keys
As mentioned in the description, this challenge will have four entities (each one should be a separate app). Here are brief descriptions of what they are and what are the expected properties of each (keep in mind that you can improve them as you wish!):
- User: can be used plain from what is offered by Django;
- Topic: the equivalent of a sub-reddit. The suggest fields are:
- Name
- Title
- Author
- Description
- URLName - the name we want to use to reach it through the browser (check SlugField)
- Created_at
- Updated_at
- Post: the equivalent of a Reddit thread, a post belongs to a specific topic and is created by an user. The
suggested fields are:
- Title
- Content
- Created_at
- Updated_at
- Topic
- Comment: the equivalent of a comment, a comment belongs to a specific post (which belongs to a specific topic)
and is created by an user. The suggested fields are:
- Title
- Content
- Created_at
- Updated_at
- Post
We want to have a behavior similar to Reddit (not necessarily equal), so ideally we'd like a structure like this:
- /topics/ - lists all available topics
- /topics/{urlname}/ - details (as well as some posts) from a specific topic (identified by urlname)
- /topics/{urlname}/posts/ - lists all posts from a specific topic
- /topics/{urlname}/posts/{post_id}/ - lists details and some comments from a post
- /topics/{urlname}/posts/{post_id}/comments/ - lists all comments from a post
- /topics/{urlname}/posts/{post_id}/comments/{comment_id}/ - lists details from a comment
If you have any doubts on how to implement these structures, check the Nested Routers documentation and the lookup field section on the Routers documentation.