Django Unleashed

25.2 Apps and AppConfig

In Chapter 1, we discovered that a Django project is a website and that a Django app is a feature of the website. A Django project is actually just the agglomeration of apps, provided by Django, ourselves, or other developers (such as the django_extensions app we used for the IPython notebooks in the github repository). The full list of apps belonging to a project is found in the settings.py file of the project, declared as the INSTALLED_APPS variable. If you are ever brought onto an existing project, looking at the INSTALLED_APPS is a great way to see all of the tools that the website uses to work.

When the server starts, Django loads the settings defined for the project, allowing it to configure the site. For example, ...