Simon Willison’s Weblog

jefftriplett/django-startproject (via) Django's django-admin startproject and startapp commands include a --template option which can be used to specify an alternative template for generating the initial code.

Jeff Triplett actively maintains his own template for new projects, which includes the pattern that I personally prefer of keeping settings and URLs in a config/ folder. It also configures the development environment to run using Docker Compose.

The latest update adds support for Python 3.13, Django 5.1 and uv. It's neat how you can get started without even installing Django using uv run like this:

uv run --with=django django-admin startproject \
  --extension=ini,py,toml,yaml,yml \
  --template=https://github.com/jefftriplett/django-startproject/archive/main.zip \
  example_project

# 12th October 2024, 11:19 pm / django, python, docker, jeff-triplett, uv

UV with GitHub Actions to run an RSS to README project. Jeff Triplett demonstrates a very neat pattern for using uv to run Python scripts with their dependencies inside of GitHub Actions. First, add uv to the workflow using the setup-uv action:

- uses: astral-sh/setup-uv@v3
  with:
    enable-cache: true
    cache-dependency-glob: "*.py"

This enables the caching feature, which stores uv's own cache of downloads from PyPI between runs. The cache-dependency-glob key ensures that this cache will be invalidated if any .py file in the repository is updated.

Now you can run Python scripts using steps that look like this:

- run: uv run fetch-rss.py

If that Python script begins with some dependency definitions (PEP 723) they will be automatically installed by uv run on the first run and reused from the cache in the future. From the start of fetch-rss.py:

# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.11"
# dependencies = [
#     "feedparser",
#     "typer",
# ]
# ///

uv will download the required Python version and cache that as well.

# 5th October 2024, 11:39 pm / python, github-actions, jeff-triplett, uv

DjangoTV (via) Brand new site by Jeff Triplett gathering together videos from Django conferences around the world. Here's Jeff's blog post introducing the project.

# 28th September 2024, 4:48 am / django, jeff-triplett

Python Development on macOS Notes: pyenv and pyenv-virtualenvwrapper (via) Jeff Triplett shares the recipe he uses for working with pyenv (initially installed via Homebrew) on macOS.

I really need to start habitually using this. The benefit of pyenv over Homebrew’s default Python is that pyenv managed Python versions are forever—your projects won’t suddenly stop working in the future when Homebrew changes its default Python version.

# 11th February 2024, 4:41 am / macosx, python, jeff-triplett

Django Release Cycle (via) Really nice visual representation of Django’s release cycle, built by Jeff Triplett as a remix of the Python release cycle by Dustin Ingram.

# 3rd April 2020, 4:56 pm / django, jeff-triplett