Some more Django recommendations from Frank Wiles of Revsys (Django consultancy): https://frankwiles.com/questions/starting-django-projects/

I'll add a few of my own:

* Set up the project using uv

* I name the django project "project"; so settings are project/settings.py, main urls are project/urls.py, etc

* I always define a custom Django user model even if I don't need anything extra yet; easier to expand later

* settings.py actually conflates project config (Django apps, middleware, etc) and instance/environment config (Database access, storages, email, auth...); I hardcode the project config (since that doesn't change between environemnts) and use python-dotenv to pull settings from environment / .env; I document all such configurable vars in .env.example, and the defaults are sane for local/dev setup (such as DEBUG=true, SQLIte database, ALLOWED_HOSTS=*, and a randomly-generated SECRET_KEY); oh and I use dj-database-url to use DATABASE_URL (defaults to sqlite:///sqlite.db)

* I immediately set up up ruff, ty, pytest, pre-commit hook and GH workflow to run ruff/ty/pytest

Previously I had elaborate scaffolding/skeleton templates, or nowadays a small shell script and I tell Claude to adapt settings.py as per above instructions :)

I'll add one; Add shell_plus. It makes the django shell so much nicer to use, especially on larger projects (mostly because it auto-imports all your models). IIRC, it involves adding ipython and django_extensions as a dependency, and then adding django-extensions (annoyingly, note that the underscore changes to a dash, this trips me up everytime I add it) to your installed apps.

Saying that, I'm sure django-extensions does a lot more than shell_plus but I've never actually explored what those extra features are, so think I'll do that now

Edit: Turns out you can use bpython, ptpython or none at all with shell_plus, so good to know if you prefer any of them to ipython

> * settings.py actually conflates project config (Django apps, middleware, etc) and instance/environment config (Database access, storages, email, auth...); I hardcode the project config (since that doesn't change between environemnts) and use python-dotenv to pull settings from environment / .env; I document all such configurable vars in .env.example, and the defaults are sane for local/dev setup (such as DEBUG=true, SQLIte database, ALLOWED_HOSTS=*, and a randomly-generated SECRET_KEY); oh and I use dj-database-url to use DATABASE_URL (defaults to sqlite:///sqlite.db)

There is a convention to create "foo_settings.py" for different environments next to "settings.py" and start it with "from .settings import *"

You'll still want something else for secrets, but this works well for everything else, including sane defaults with overrides (like DEBUG=False in the base and True in only the appropriate ones).

> use python-dotenv to pull settings from environment / .env

I disagree strongly with this one. All you are doing is moving those settings to a different file. You might as well use a local settings file that reads the common settings.

On production keep things like API keys that need to be kept secret elsewhere - as a minimum outside the project directories and owned by a different user.