Setup Overview

Files

Project structure

<root>
├── src/ # main project folder
    ├── data/ # where sqlite database should be stored
    ├── config/ # project named config
        ├── settings/
            ├── __init__.py # switch env: dev | test | prod
            ├── _auth.py # django_allauth, postmark email
            ├── _settings.py # base settings
    ├── static/
    ├── profiles/ # custom user + profile model app, manages user settings
    ├── pages/ # legalase + userconsent, basic pages, UI components
    ├── scripts/ # entrypoint for compose.yml, fly.toml
    ├── templates/ # contains base.html
        ├── account/ # overrides django-allauth html templates
        ├── socialaccount/ # overrides django-allauth html templates
        ├── svg/ # used by django-fragments
    ├── tests/ # with pytest-django
    ├── manage.py # management command

Default

Aspect	Scenario	Configuration	Expected Result
	Defaults to sqlite.	If postgres desired, ensure DATABASE_URL setup in .env before running just start	Local postgres instance used
	Emails default to stdout	Setup Postmark (note, only 100/free per month)	Transactional emails (and the contact form) will use Postmark to deliver emails
	Images use local file storage system	Setup Cloudflare Images (note, $5 per month)	Images uploaded/changed will be stored in Cloudflare Images
	Social auth errors out, e.g. "Cannot encode None for key 'client_id' in a query string. Did you mean to pass an empty string or omit the value?"	Setup Google env vars, Github env vars	User can use Google and Github to signup without creating a password
	Background processes default to {"immediate": True}, i.e. no worker queue	Use either ENV_NAME 'test' or 'prod'

Prelims

Transactional emails , remote storage , social auth will not yet be cloud-ready until configured. If setting up these services for the first time, can expect this to take 15min to an hour. When addressed, .env can be populated with relevant key-value pairs:

Expected .env file values

# postmarkapp.com for transactional emails
POSTMARK_API_KEY=op://dev/postmark/credential

# recipient email address for contact form
EMAIL_RECIPIENT=op://dev/start-django/email/recipient

# sender email address for transactional emails, configured with postmark
EMAIL_SENDER=op://dev/start-django/email/sender

# django-allauth social auth with google as provider
GOOGLE_ID=op://dev/auth-local/google/id
GOOGLE_KEY=op://dev/auth-local/google/secret

# django-allauth social auth with github as provider
GITHUB_ID=op://dev/auth-local/github/id
GITHUB_KEY=op://dev/auth-local/github/secret

# cloudflare images as storage class
CF_ACCT_ID=op://dev/cf-img/acct_id
CF_IMG_TOKEN=op://dev/cf-img/token
CF_IMG_HASH=op://dev/cf-img/hash

op:// is a convention for secret references in .env. Unnecessary if you don't use 1Password; can be replaced directly by explicit values, e.g. DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=i-am-a-value.