Connecting to a database using Django involves several steps, as outlined in Django’s official documentation (docs.djangoproject.com). Django is a powerful python-based free and open-source web framework that follows the model-template-views (MTV) architectural pattern. It is capable of connecting to various databases including PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, SQLite, and Oracle.
The initial process involves defining the database configurations within the settings.py module, which is automatically created when you start a new Django project. Below briefly describes the steps:
1. Locate ‘settings.py’ file.
1. Locate and edit DATABASES section: This is a dictionary where the ‘default’ item is required to connect to the database.
To illustrate, let’s consider the example of connecting Django to a PostgreSQL database:
```
DATABASES = {
‘default’: {
‘ENGINE’: ‘django.db.backends.postgresql’,
‘NAME’: ‘
}
```
In this example, ENGINE is a full Python path to the database engine class, NAME is the name of our database, USER is the username for your PostgreSQL account that will be used to connect to the database, PASSWORD should be the password for this user, HOST is the hostname where your PostgreSQL service is running and PORT is the port on which PostgreSQL is listening.
Upon setting up the DATABASES dictionary in your settings file, you need to use Django’s command-line utility to create the database tables, which will look at your INSTALLED\_APPS setting and create any necessary database tables according to the database settings in your settings.py file and the database schema of your models. Run the following command:
```
python manage.py migrate
```
This will create the necessary tables in your database according to the models in your Django application. You also need to ensure that the user has the necessary permissions to create, drop and manage the tables.
This is a very basic example, other settings such as OPTIONS, ATOMIC_REQUESTS, AUTOCOMMIT, CONN_MAX\_AGE, and others can be defined according to specific functionality needs.
Beforehand, always make sure you have the necessary database adapter installed. For PostgreSQL, for example, you would need to have ‘psycopg2’ installed on your python environment.
Therefore, connecting a Django project to a database mainly involves correctly setting up the database configurations in the settings.py file and ensuring that the Python database adapter is installed.
Sources:
1. Django Documentation (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/databases/)
2. PostgreSQL Django (https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-python/connect/)
