URLs

URLconfs

A project will have a top-level urls.py (referred to as a URLconf in the docs), and apps can also have their own URLconf files as well.

Each URLconf will contain an array of paths named urlpatterns, which are used to navigate the website.

urlpatterns = [
    path('path-one/', include('pathOne.urls')),
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

ROOT_URLCONF

This setting tells Django which URLconf to use as the base level resolver of URLs

include()

In the example above you see the use of include('appOne.urls'). Include allows you to have nested URLs which are defined in a given package's URLconf. In the example above, navigating to /path-one/something-else in your URL will use the URLconf of appOne to map something-else to a specific view

path()

The path function defines a single mapping of a URL to a behaviour/view. Paths are found in lists in a URLconf, as shown above.

The path() function takes four arguments:

route (required)

route is a string representation of a URL pattern. GET request params are not included when searching routes for a match, only the base URL.

view (required)

The view passed is used when Django finds a matching URL pattern. Django passes an HttpRequest as the first argument to the view, and a list of kwargs as the second argument.

kwargs (optional)

A dictionary of keyword arguments to be passed to the target view

name (optional)

You can name your URL so that it can be referenced unambiguously from elsewhere in Django, especially from within templates.

Extracting variables from a URL

You can extract values from a URL to use in your code by doing something like the following:

path('<int:question_id>', views.detail, name='detail')

The int part denotes what sort of value Django should match when looking at the URL, and question_id assigns the matched value with to a keyword argument which gets passed to views.detail