Views & URLs

How a page gets built

When someone visits a page on your site, Django follows a fixed path to decide what to send back. Knowing this request → response flow makes everything else click into place.

1. The browser asks for a web address (a URL), for example / or /about.
2. Django looks down its list of URL patterns until it finds one that matches.
3. That match points to a view — a Python function — which Django runs, handing it the request.
4. The view does its work and returns a response (some text, or a full HTML page).
5. Django sends that response back to the browser, which shows it to the user.

A view is a Python function

A view is just a normal Python function that takes the incoming request and returns something to show. The simplest one returns a short piece of text:

# blog/views.py
from django.http import HttpResponse

def home(request):
    return HttpResponse("Welcome to my blog!")

Line by line: we import HttpResponse (Django’s way of sending a reply). We define home, which receives request (information about who is visiting). It returns an HttpResponse holding the text the visitor will see. That is a complete, working view.

Connect a URL to it

A view does nothing on its own — you must tell Django which web address should run it. You do that in a urls.py file by adding the view to the urlpatterns list:

# blog/urls.py
from django.urls import path
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path("", views.home, name="home"),
]

Here path() links an address to a view. The first argument "" is the address (empty means the app’s home page). The second, views.home, is the view function to run. The third, name="home", is a nickname you can use elsewhere to refer to this URL without re-typing the address.

Finally, the project needs to know about the app’s URLs. In the main mysite/urls.py you include the app’s url file so its patterns are added to the site:

# mysite/urls.py  — include the app’s urls
from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    path("", include("blog.urls")),
]

include("blog.urls") tells Django: "for addresses starting here, hand off to the blog app’s URL list." Now visiting / runs home and the browser shows your message.