Django Run Locally

When to use

Use this skill to spin up or invoke the local development backend sequence for rapid testing processes.

Steps

1. Navigate securely into the active architecture directory: cd app
2. Synchronously install or update environment dependencies strictly through uv: uv sync --all-extras --all-groups
3. Activate the standard CLI venv wrapper: . .venv/bin/activate
4. Deploy local DB schema synchronization calls: python manage.py migrate
5. (Optional) Setup initial admin: python manage.py create_admin_user
6. Build Frontend Assets:

   make npminstall
   python manage.py collectstatic --noinput
   python manage.py compress --force
   

7. Initialize the development environment natively: python manage.py runserver

Validation

1. Verify server startup output bindings properly format against standard generic ports (ex. 127.0.0.1:8000).
2. There should be no pending/unapplied migration warnings displayed.
3. Verify http://127.0.0.1:8000 loads properly without missing CSS/MIME type errors.

Gotchas

• Strict Environment Imports: If context dynamically requires variable settings locally, ALWAYS safely fetch these utilizing from django.conf import settings. Never import the isolated system settings configuration natively (e.g. absolutely never execute from eventyay.config import settings).
• CSS not loading / MIME type errors: Ensure you have successfully run collectstatic and compress --force steps to properly build the Javascript/CSS chunks.