startproject and startapp should provide feedback

[Thibaud Colas]

Initially proposed on the ​Django Forum – Feature request: startproject and startapp should provide feedback, where this received 4 "likes" and 5 comments saying this was a good enhancement.

I’d like to propose adding a success message / feedback when running the startproject and startapp commands. For people who are experienced devs it might be expected that a successful script exists without any output. For beginners, it can be very confusing.

This shows up as an issue for people who go through Django tutorials, as django-admin and startproject are often their first point of contact with the framework after installing Django.

From personal experience with Django Girls in particular, this is causing a common issue where people won’t realise the command has worked so will run it multiple times with different options (for example with or without a destination folder), which leads to at best confusing error messages, at worst multiple projects created within one-another.

Output options

Based on the feedback in the forum, I’d recommend starting with the simplest output of confirming the command worked and restating what happened.

Success one-liner

For example, running:

django-admin startproject mysite

The command would display:

Success! Created mysite at /absolute/path/to/where/startproject/created/mysite

I think adding this to startproject or startapp would make for a great PR (or two great PRs).

Files created

If the person taking this on has the skills, it’d be nice to also display a recap of what files were created. This will be relevant for both commands, and no matter what template was in use.

For example, running:

django-admin startproject mysite

We could show:

mysite
├── manage.py
└── mysite
       ├── __init__.py
       ├── asgi.py
       ├── settings.py
       ├── urls.py
       └── wsgi.py

This could be a separate PR if this proves complex. And if this kind of good-looking line art is too hard to do in Django, we could use simple indentation instead:

mysite/
    manage.py
    mysite/
        __init__.py
        settings.py
        urls.py
        asgi.py
        wsgi.py

[Abhay Vachhani]

Assigned ticket to Abhay Vachhani

[Mariusz Felisiak]

​PR

[Thibaud Colas]

New PR: ​Refs #34976 -- Provide feedback when startapp and startproject are called #17722 by @salvo-polizzi

[Thibaud Colas]

Follow-up PR by @TobeTek with directory structure output: ​Refs #34976 -- Print directory structure after startapp and startproject #17838

[Sarah Boyce]

Note that we need the accessibility team to review the tree structure proposal. It has been raised this may not be accessible for speech and braille users.
Still happy to have a success message, but -1 on adding something that would exclude users. I have added a similar comment in the forum discussion 👍