Revisiting the project root vs project_slug folder for creating apps #4031
Description
Description
This issue is in the vein of #1725 and #3803, and discussions elsewhere e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39838290/is-there-a-command-for-creating-an-app-using-cookiecutter-django
The basic question is where is the canonical place to create an app?
- The most natural thing to do,
./manage.py startapp <app_name>, creates it at the root level which looks yucky. - Moving it manually and tinkering with
apps.pyaesthetically looks nice (except theLOCAL_APPSin settings) but seems to not work in edge cases. e.g., I use a lot of Django's lazy loading of ForeignKey models (using strings) to avoid circular imports. In this situation I'm now forced to sayproject_slug.app_name.ModelNamewhich is not an allowed thing to do.
My proposal is that we consider (the inner, as in not project root) {{cookiecutter.project_slug}} folder the root folder you'd get if you did django-admin.py startproject project_slug, and possibly even call it src.
Then you'd have something like:
{{cookiecutter.project_slug}}
├── compose
├── docs
├── locale
├── requirements
└── src
├── manage.py
├── app1
├── app2
├── {{cookiecutter.project_slug}}
│ ├── config
│ │ └── settings
│ ├── contrib
│ │ └── sites
│ │ └── migrations
│ ├── static
│ │ ├── css
│ │ ├── fonts
│ │ ├── images
│ │ │ └── favicons
│ │ ├── js
│ │ └── sass
│ ├── templates
│ │ ├── account
│ │ ├── pages
│ │ └── users
│ └── utils
└── users
├── api
├── migrations
└── tests
In the above, the users app is no longer special, and doesn't need to be imported as {{cookiecutter.project_slug}}.users in the settings file. The config folder is also moved, but is perhaps not even necessary as it might be more vanilla Django to simply have.
└── src
├── manage.py
├── app1
├── app2
├── {{cookiecutter.project_slug}}
│ ├── settings
I am a fan of this project and I try to use it and get caught up on this specific aspect of where to create an app every time I try. I would be willing to implement these proposed changes as an experiment if others agree with the general thought process.