My Django Setup

I picked up my old MacBook from the Apple Store with a new, bigger, and spotless, hard drive, with a fresh install of Leopard.

Time consuming as it is to set up a computer from scratch, it's actually something I'd been meaning to do. The death of my old hard drive just forced me to do so sooner, and a little less gently than I might have liked. But it is nice starting from scratch.

With that in mind, I decided I should set up my development environment the Right Way: with code sandboxed as much as possible and projects organized in a sensible way. On my old setup, I'd created a "djcode" folder in my home directory, because at the time, all I was doing was Django. Two years later, that folder was cluttered with random test scripts (mostly Python), abandoned projects and apps, failed experiments and a lot of other junk.

You'd never know it looking at my desk at work (think grenade plus vending machine), but I actually do try to keep myself somewhat organized, at least digitally. So here's what my new arrangement looks like:

/home/chrisamico/
    /code
        /python
            /project1_ve
            /project2_ve
        /ruby
            /gems

Everything that looks like code, goes in code. Each language gets a folder. Each Python project gets a virtualenv. For now, since I've just started toying with Ruby, I'm still installing gems globally, but that feels messy. I may try to get Sandbox working soon, though.

From there, I try to make getting new projects up and running as painless as possible. Pip goes a long way in that regard. I keep a requirements file in my Python folder called django-requirements.txt that looks something like this:

ipython
docutils
PIL
django

Then it's just virtualenv --no-site-packages project_name and pip install -E project_name -r django-requirements.txt1 to glory.

And just in case something's wrong with this, I'll get to try again when I eventually upgrade to Snow Leopard.

So that's my setup. What about you, reader? How do (or don't) you organize yourself?

Before: Mobilized. | After: Dual tracking