Issues using mySQL on OS X in the tutorial

[helge@…]

Hi there!

At first a big thank you for the great tutorial. I started a point zero and now I got some nice app working (only in local lightweight webserver deployment). When I started the tutorial I wanted to use it with mySQL which was already installed on my machine. But for some reason it did not work (i keep trying to fix this issue but still have no clue until now).

I have extensively documented my experience with the tutorial (as newbie to both, python & django) here:
​http://www.thetawelle.de/?p=3047

One part which always really gets into the way of making things work smoothly is that the importance of UNIX environment vars is completely left in the dark. That is not any different on this tutorial. I have no clue which env vars do exist, get used, and how they influence the whole django/python cosmos.

e.g. what exactly is the "pythonpath"? I mean I know the search paths which I handle in my bash_profile. It would be so much easier to understand whats going on, if you could give a little clue about the task of env vars here. I also think that these env vars are a thing that is not very well understood by most people.

I mean I am coming from Xcode and Objective-C where I do not have to do a lot of stuff on the shell. But for python and django the shell is the natual environment where it lives. A short quickstart on the most important things of the env vars would be a huge improvment on the tutorial.

Another helpful improvement would be to explain upfront, what these installers (like pip) are actually doing. I do not want to know every single step, but it would be so helpful to know if they are special binaries, if they are scripts, if in which language, and what kind of operations they will carry out for me. If I call this stuff via "sudo" I basically should know about this. I just trusted the installer this time, but I should have been more careful I think.

Best & thanks already for the nice tutorial,
Helge

[Tim Graham]

Thanks for your feedback, it's helpful to get feedback from people who are new to Django. I think most of the issues you've raised are either Operating System specific (environment variables) or concepts that should be taught in a Python tutorial (PYTHONPATH). Django assumes some basic knowledge of Python and related concepts -- we can't reasonably expect to teach everything. Knowing that, if you can propose some specific text, we could consider it. Also, if you report a ticket in the future, please try to report one issue per ticket. Thank-you!

[Marc Tamlyn]

Looks like you had a pretty good experience with the tutorial. I've read your blog post and I'll leave some more specific comments there about some of the little issues you had.

We try to keep our tutorial as a tutorial for Django, rather than a tutorial for python. Things like pip and PYTHONPATH aren't really the domain of our tutorial, so we try to just give enough information to make things work and keep it moving so people actually see a website. People do the tutorial from a huge range of backgrounds - if you were an experienced rails developer you'd very quickly go "ok, pip is gem for python" and move on - similarly npm in node and so on.

One comment you made in your blog with was very salient was about the "done any work" - I think that comment could be improved to "you haven't actually built a site yet".

|n any case, I'm going to close this ticket - if you feel strongly about the "done any work" comment feel free to open a new one specifically about that (and provide a patch?).