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The views that render "general" templates where they should be (home.html, about.html, etc)? | Django

I have templates for example like home.html, about.html, etc. Which are "general."
Where should the views that render these views be located?
I am not convinced to place these views in the applications of my project, since each one has a very specific purpose. It occurs to me to create an application specifically for these "general" views, but what should this application be called? Is it good practice to do it?
Another solution would be to put the views in the urlconf, as follows:
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
from django.views.generic import TemplateView
urlpatterns = [
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
path('', TemplateView.as_view(template_name = 'pages/home.html'), name = 'home'), # here
...
]
But is this alternative of good practice?
Is there a much better alternative?

Just put them in your global app. Let's suppose my Django project name is project_name and I have an app called tasks. Here is what I would do:
~/projects/projects_name/
project_name/ # project dir (the one which django-admin.py creates)
...
settings/ # settings for different environments, see below
__init__.py
...
views.py # Put here global views (home, etc.)
urls.py
wsgi.py
static/ # site-specific static files
templates/ # site-specific templates
project_name/
home.html
about.html
tests/ # site-specific tests (mostly in-browser ones)
...
tasks/
...
static/ # tasks app-specific static files
templates/ # tasks app-specific templates

Getting error when I am trying to fetch my main url patterns

I am a beginner in Django I have created a Django project in that I have included two more application when I did add urls.py file in both Applications both are working well but when I am fetching my main admin URL it is giving an error
Page not found (404)
Request Method: GET
URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/
the URLconf defined in mac.urls, Django tried these URL patterns, in this order:
admin/
shop/
blog/
The empty path didn't match any of these.
You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to
False, and Django will display a standard 404 page.
when I am fetching this URL in http://127.0.0.1:8000/ i am getting an error it is working for http://127.0.0.1:8000/shop/
here is my main urls.py
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
urlpatterns = [
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
path('shop/', include('shop.urls')),
path('blog/', include('blog.urls')),
]

Your django app has 3 routes:
http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ goes to django admin app
http://127.0.0.1:8000/shop/ goes to your shop app
http://127.0.0.1:8000/blog/ goes to your blog app
And since you have no configuration for http://127.0.0.1:8000, you see an error instead.
You can see that in the error, when django tries to match your url with list of available urls.
If you want to get admin app on url http://127.0.0.1:8000, change urls.py to:
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
urlpatterns = [
path('', admin.site.urls),
path('shop/', include('shop.urls')),
path('blog/', include('blog.urls')),
]
It's generally not advisable to set admin app at root url - it has it's own system of urls inside (admin/<app_name>/<model_name>), so chances are it will shadow your urls and make the unreachable.

Create a view that will be your front page.
From there you should link to the other areas of your website.
Don't direct that to admin, that's ridiculous.

You've created a Django project and started two apps. You should have a project-level urls.py file and then an app-level urls.py file for each of your apps.
To explain that in greater detail lets say our Django project is called config and our two apps are called app1 and app2. Your project-level urls.py file, which will be located at config/urls.py, could contain the following:
# config/urls.py
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
from django.views.generic.base import TemplateView
urlpatterns = [
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
path('', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='home.html'),
name='home'),
path('app1/', include('app1.urls')),
path('app2/', include('app2.urls')),
]
In this file we specify a route for our admin panel, which on your local server will be located at http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin. We've also specified a home route, the second path with the empty string. This means when you navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ you will be directed to your home page (for the example above I just used a generic built-in view). It's not a good idea to route immediately to your admin panel.
We've also included paths to our other two apps. What these two lines essentially say is: "include the urls from this other app". Now we need to create two urls.py files, one for each of our apps. In this example I'll just focus on the urls.py file for app1:
# app1/urls.py
from django.urls import path
from .views import AppContentView
urlpatterns = [
path('content/', AppContentView.as_view(),
name='app_content'),
]
This is a view that you would have to create, but what we've now done is we've created one path that will be located at http://127.0.0.1:8000/app1/content. In fact any new paths we create in this file will always begin with http://127.0.0.1:8000/app1/, because we've already told Django in our project-level urls.py to include the urls from the app1 urls.py file so we've essentially prefixed all of these paths with /app1/.
If you think of urls configurations like a tree it might help too:
Project Level Url Configs.
|
|
|
___________________________
| |
| |
App 1 Url Configs. App 2 Url Configs.

RedirectView.as_view not working at the root

In a django 1.8 project, I am attempting to redirect http://myProject/ads.txt to an external url http://a.location.that.has.the.ads.txt.file and thus serve the ads.txt file without using ftp to simply place the ads.txt in the root.
Given this minimal directory structure:
django projects
myProject
myapp
urls.py
views.py
someotherapp
yetanotherapp
myProject
settings.py
urls.py (this is the top urls.py)
views.py
in myProject/myProject/urls.py, (the “top” urls.py) I have as the first entry in the urlpatterns list, the lines:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^ads\.txt', RedirectView.as_view(url='http://a.location.that.has.the.ads.txt.file', permanent=False)),
followed by many more pattern matching regex’s. This does not work and fails with a 404. What does work is
urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^foo/ads\.txt', RedirectView.as_view(url='http://a.location.that.has.the.ads.txt.file', permanent=False)),
and then calling http://myProject/foo/ads.txt
Unfortunately, ads.txt files must be placed at the site root. I have tried many different regex’s that test fine in a regex validator, but just don’t work (returns 404). How do I do this without the extra dir “foo”? Any thoughts appreciated. Thank you.

Turns out you cannot redirect with the top level urls.py "routing table" to above the Django project root. A nginx server level redirect did the trick.

Django Tutorial - Part 1 - URL didn't match

This has been asked before, but the problems were usually with placement of the mysite/urls.py or missing text somewhere. I've gone over those in detail, but doesn't apply here. I'm following the django tutorial EXACTLY, which means it hasn't referenced including the polls app in the settings.py file. I can pull up the right view if I manually type in the "polls" at the end of the url, as in "http://127.0.0.1:8000/polls" but I shouldn't have to do this for it to work. I'm also assuming the tutorial isn't wrong in some way. Link to the tutorial is: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/intro/tutorial01/
The error I get:
Page not found (404)
Request Method: GET
Request URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Using the URLconf defined in mysite.urls, Django tried these URL patterns, in this order:
^polls/
^admin/
The current URL, , didn't match any of these.
My views.py file:
from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse
def index(request):
return HttpResponse("Hello, world. You're at the polls index.")
My polls/urls.py file:
from django.conf.urls import url
from . import views
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^$', views.index, name='index'),
]
My mysite/mysite/urls.py file:
from django.conf.urls import include, url
from django.contrib import admin
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^polls/', include('polls.urls')),
url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
]
This is the tree for the mysite/mysite directory just to show that I am in the right folder (there is no separate urls.py file in the main mysite directory):
.
├── __init__.py
├── __pycache__
│   ├── __init__.cpython-35.pyc
│   ├── settings.cpython-35.pyc
│   ├── urls.cpython-35.pyc
│   └── wsgi.cpython-35.pyc
├── settings.py
├── urls.py
└── wsgi.py
Again, best I can tell this is to the letter following the django tutorial guidance. I'd like to fix it, but more importantly understand why it isn't working.

Have you checked the INSTALLED_APPS variable in the settings file to include the 'polls' app?

Django path to templates for apps

Let's assume I have the following project:
myproject/
myproject/
__init__.py
settings.py
urls.py
wsgi.py
templates/
base.html
app1/
__init__.py
admin.py
models.py
urls.py
views.py
templates/
base.html
index.html
I want to have a base template, which all other apps will use, in myproject/template/base.html.
Then, I want to have the app templates in app/templates.
One option would be writting in myproject/settings.py:
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
"/dir/to/myproject/myproject/templates",
"/dir/to/myproject/app1/templates",
)
But, is this the best way to do it?

Django supports this automatically, via the app_directories loader that is installed by default. See the documentation.

Maybe you can do the following:
#settings.py
import os
PROJECT_PATH = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
os.path.join(PROJECT_PATH, 'templates'),
os.path.join(PROJECT_PATH, 'app1/templates'),
)
This will save you from editing each and every absolute path in setting file in case you happen to move your project.