Read 27 - corey-marchand/401-python-data-structures GitHub Wiki

Overview

  • The Django admin application can use your models to automatically build a site area that you can use to create, view, update, and delete records. This can save you a lot of time during development, making it very easy to test your models and get a feel for whether you have the right data. The admin application can also be useful for managing data in production, depending on the type of website. The Django project recommends it only for internal data management (i.e. just for use by admins, or people internal to your organization), as the model-centric approach is not necessarily the best possible interface for all users, and exposes a lot of unnecessary detail about the models.

  • All the configuration required to include the admin application in your website was done automatically when you created the skeleton project (for information about actual dependencies needed, see the Django docs here). As a result, all you must do to add your models to the admin application is to register them. At the end of this article we'll provide a brief demonstration of how you might further configure the admin area to better display our model data.

  • After registering the models we'll show how to create a new "superuser", login to the site, and create some books, authors, book instances, and genres. These will be useful for testing the views and templates we'll start creating in the next tutorial.

Registering models

  • First, open admin.py in the catalog application (/locallibrary/catalog/admin.py). It currently looks like this — note that it already imports django.contrib.admin:
from django.contrib import admin

# Register your models here.

Creating a superuser

In order to log into the admin site, we need a user account with Staff status enabled. In order to view and create records we also need this user to have permissions to manage all our objects. You can create a "superuser" account that has full access to the site and all needed permissions using manage.py.

python3 manage.py createsuperuser

python3 manage.py runserver