Replace os.path with pathlib.Path in project template and docs

[thewhisperinyourears]

Apparently there is an issue hen you are using linux (Ubuntu) and copy and paste your project to Windows. The Paths don't work. I had to change the settings in my STATICFILES_DIRS from os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'myapp/static') to os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'myapp', 'static')

[Curtis Maloney]

I was helping this user on IRC, and they were getting confusing errors when running "collectstatic" or "findstatic" about the path not matching.

It turned out to be a conflict with joining Windows-style paths with Unix-style paths, as mentioned above.

I'm going to look at replacing uses of os.path.join and its ilk with pathlib, which does not suffer this problem.

[Tim Graham]

I'm surprised this hasn't come up before. What does the error look like?

The documentation for STATICFILES_DIRS days, "these paths should use Unix-style forward slashes, even on Windows". I guess the problem is that the way BASE_DIR is generated on Windows using backslashes. It's not clear to me what Django can do about this but we'll see what Curtis comes up with.

[Tim Graham]

The patch doesn't work because os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3') returns a string while BASE_DIR / 'db.sqlite3' returns a PosixPath. The documentation would have to use str(BASE_DIR / 'db.sqlite3') everywhere or Django would have to convert PosixPath to string.

[Jon Dufresne]

I have resurrected the original patch with a fix for SQLite.

​PR

[Claude Paroz]

I'm not sure if various Django settings requiring a path (template DIRS, STATIC/MEDIA_ROOT, etc.) all support path inputs. Shouldn't we check and add tests for those before changing the project settings template?

[Carlton Gibson]

Assigning Jon, since he's picked this up; marking as needs tests, since I think Claude is right, we have had regressions from moving to Path.

[Carlton Gibson <carlton.gibson@…>]

In 92e5abd7:

Refs #29983 -- Added test for FIXTURES_DIRS pathlib support.

[Carlton Gibson <carlton.gibson@…>]

In 1c4c68d:

Refs #29983 -- Added test for FILE_UPLOAD_TEMP_DIR pathlib support.

[Carlton Gibson <carlton.gibson@…>]

In fbbff7f:

Refs #29983 -- Added pathlib.Path support to the file email backend.

[Carlton Gibson <carlton.gibson@…>]

In 74f2a58b:

Refs #29983 -- Added tests for FileBasedCache pathlib support.

[Carlton Gibson <carlton.gibson@…>]

In 77aa74c:

Refs #29983 -- Added support for using pathlib.Path in all settings.

[Carlton Gibson <carlton.gibson@…>]

In 26554cf5:

Fixed #29983 -- Replaced os.path() with pathlib.Path in project template and docs.

Thanks Curtis Maloney for the original patch.

[Carlton Gibson <carlton@…>]

In 150c3d13:

Refs #29983 -- Fixed displaying pathlib.Path database name in flush command's inputs.