Creating a Django Project

A Django project is created with a single command, django-admin startproject mysite, which generates a directory containing manage.py and an inner package also named mysite holding four key files: settings.py, urls.py, wsgi.py, and asgi.py. This one command scaffolds the entire skeleton a Django site needs before a single line of application code is written, which is why it's the very first step in any Django tutorial and any real production project alike.

manage.py is a command-line utility used for administrative tasks like runserver, migrate, and startapp, and it works by setting the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable before delegating to Django's internal command-line tooling. settings.py centralizes configuration, including INSTALLED_APPS (which apps are active), DATABASES (connection details, SQLite by default), MIDDLEWARE (a list of hooks that process every request/response), and ALLOWED_HOSTS (which domains may serve the site) — a value that must be set correctly in production or Django will reject incoming requests with a 400 error.

python manage.py runserver starts Django's lightweight built-in web server, typically listening on http://127.0.0.1:8000/, and is intended purely for local development — it is single-threaded by default, has no production-grade security hardening, and Django's own documentation explicitly warns against using it in production. Visiting the URL immediately after startproject shows Django's default 'The install worked successfully' congratulations page, confirming settings.py is valid and the WSGI application can be served, before any app-specific views have been added.