A different approach to organizing your Django project

The single folder application

Photo by Eric Mok on Unsplash

Recently, I faced an issue of package name clashing between a private library we developed in my company and a Django application I was developing. This made me rethink how to organize a Django project.

Default organization

If you follow the official Django tutorial, you will end up with something like the following:

mysite/
    manage.py
    mysite/
        __init__.py
        settings.py
        urls.py
        asgi.py
        wsgi.py
polls/
    __init__.py
    admin.py
    apps.py
    migrations/
        __init__.py
    models.py
    tests.py
    views.py

You have the root package mysite and Django applications following along like polls. This works well until you install a third-party package called polls. 😬Now you will have an issue knowing where from polls… comes from.

New organization

To avoid this situation, this is now the configuration I follow and recommend:

mysite/
    manage.py
    mysite/
        __init__.py
        settings.py
        urls.py
        asgi.py
        wsgi.py
    polls/
        __init__.py
        admin.py
        apps.py
        migrations/
            __init__.py
        models.py…