Opened 13 months ago

Last modified 8 months ago

#34976 assigned Cleanup/optimization

startproject and startapp should provide feedback

Reported by: Thibaud Colas Owned by: Salvo Polizzi
Component: Core (Management commands) Version: dev
Severity: Normal Keywords: tutorial, command, startproject, startapp
Cc: Triage Stage: Accepted
Has patch: yes Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: yes
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: yes

Description (last modified by Thibaud Colas)

Initially proposed on the Django Forum – Feature request: startproject and startapp should provide feedback, where this received 4 "likes" and 5 comments saying this was a good enhancement.

I’d like to propose adding a success message / feedback when running the startproject and startapp commands. For people who are experienced devs it might be expected that a successful script exists without any output. For beginners, it can be very confusing.

This shows up as an issue for people who go through Django tutorials, as django-admin and startproject are often their first point of contact with the framework after installing Django.

From personal experience with Django Girls in particular, this is causing a common issue where people won’t realise the command has worked so will run it multiple times with different options (for example with or without a destination folder), which leads to at best confusing error messages, at worst multiple projects created within one-another.

Output options

Based on the feedback in the forum, I’d recommend starting with the simplest output of confirming the command worked and restating what happened.

Success one-liner

For example, running:

django-admin startproject mysite

The command would display:

Success! Created mysite at /absolute/path/to/where/startproject/created/mysite

I think adding this to startproject or startapp would make for a great PR (or two great PRs).

Files created

If the person taking this on has the skills, it’d be nice to also display a recap of what files were created. This will be relevant for both commands, and no matter what template was in use.

For example, running:

django-admin startproject mysite

We could show:

mysite
├── manage.py
└── mysite
       ├── __init__.py
       ├── asgi.py
       ├── settings.py
       ├── urls.py
       └── wsgi.py

This could be a separate PR if this proves complex. And if this kind of good-looking line art is too hard to do in Django, we could use simple indentation instead:

mysite/
    manage.py
    mysite/
        __init__.py
        settings.py
        urls.py
        asgi.py
        wsgi.py

Change History (17)

comment:1 by Thibaud Colas, 13 months ago

Description: modified (diff)

comment:2 by Mariusz Felisiak, 13 months ago

Summary: Feature request: startproject and startapp should provide feedbackstartproject and startapp should provide feedback
Triage Stage: UnreviewedAccepted
Type: New featureCleanup/optimization

comment:3 by Abhay Vachhani, 13 months ago

Owner: changed from nobody to Abhay Vachhani
Status: newassigned

Assigned ticket to Abhay Vachhani

comment:4 by Mariusz Felisiak, 13 months ago

Has patch: set
Needs tests: set
Patch needs improvement: set

comment:5 by Salvo Polizzi, 11 months ago

Needs tests: unset
Owner: changed from Abhay Vachhani to Salvo Polizzi

comment:6 by Salvo Polizzi, 11 months ago

Patch needs improvement: unset

comment:8 by Mariusz Felisiak, 11 months ago

Patch needs improvement: set

comment:9 by Salvo Polizzi, 11 months ago

Patch needs improvement: unset

comment:10 by Mariusz Felisiak, 11 months ago

Patch needs improvement: set

comment:11 by Salvo Polizzi, 10 months ago

Patch needs improvement: unset

comment:12 by Mariusz Felisiak, 10 months ago

Needs tests: set

comment:13 by Thibaud Colas, 10 months ago

Follow-up PR by @TobeTek with directory structure output: Refs #34976 -- Print directory structure after startapp and startproject #17838

comment:14 by Natalia Bidart, 9 months ago

Patch needs improvement: set

comment:15 by Salvo Polizzi, 8 months ago

Needs tests: unset
Patch needs improvement: unset

comment:16 by Sarah Boyce, 8 months ago

Patch needs improvement: set

comment:17 by Sarah Boyce, 8 months ago

Note that we need the accessibility team to review the tree structure proposal. It has been raised this may not be accessible for speech and braille users.
Still happy to have a success message, but -1 on adding something that would exclude users. I have added a similar comment in the forum discussion 👍

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