Django Views

In the last step, we set up our URL so that when someone visits the homepage (http://127.0.0.1:8000/), Django knows to run a specific function called a view. Now it’s time to create that view!

The view is the brain behind what your user see on the screen. It recieve the request. It will request information from the model you created before, add any extra logic (like filtering, sorting, etc.) and pass it to a template. We’ll create a template in the next chapter.

Views are just Python functions that are a little bit more complicated than the ones we wrote in the Python tutorial.

Views are placed in the views.py file. We will add our views to the bakeries/views.py file.

bakeries/views.py

OK, let’s open up this file in our code editor and see what’s in there:

from django.shortcuts import render

# Create your views here.

Not too much stuff here yet.

Remember that lines starting with # are comments – this means that those lines won’t be run by Python.

Let’s create a view as the comment suggests. Add the following minimal view below it:

from django.shortcuts import render

+from .models import Bakery

+def index(request):
+    context = {
+        "bakeries": Bakery.objects.all()
+    }
+    return render(request, "index.html", context)

As you can see, we created a function (def) called index that takes request and will return the value it gets from calling another function render that will render (put together) our template bakeries/templates/index.html.

Save the file, go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and see what we’ve got.

An Error! Read what’s going on now:

This shows that the server is running again, at least, but it still doesn’t look right, does it? Don’t worry, it’s just an error page, nothing to be scared of! Just like the error messages in the console, these are actually pretty useful. You can read that the TemplateDoesNotExist. Let’s fix this bug and create a template in the next step!

Learn more about Django views by reading the official documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/topics/http/views/