How to Create Django Environment With Visual Studio Code on Debian

Django is a popular high-level Python framework for web development. In this tutorial, we are going to do a quick walk-through of setting up Django development environment with Visual Studio Code on Debian.

Visual Studio Code

There are two major ways(.deb package and repo) to install VS Code in linux distros based on Debian. Since I usually don’t use .deb or add any other repo into my Debian OS for security reasons, we will go through another route - snap store.

Install snap on Debian

sudo apt install snapd

Install VS Code via Snap Store

sudo snap install --classic code

Django

As always, it is highly recommended to use a virtual environment to manage the packages as the project grows.

Create venv

mkdir django_project  #  Create a directory for our demo project
cd django_project
python3 -m venv venv

Launch VS Code

In the same terminal, we are going to launch VS Code. For some reason, I need to append --disable--gpu in my setup.

code . --disable-gpu

The next step is to install Python extension for VS Code. This can be done through its GUI.

VS Code Python extension

Further, we need to select Python interpreter for our project. Hit Ctrl+Shift+P and search Python: Select Interpreter. From the list, select the directory that starts with ./venv

Install django

We can create a new integrated terminal in VS Code by Ctrl+`. By default, the venv we created earlier will be activated automatically.

(venv) pip install -U pip  # Update pip
(venv) pip install django

That’s it! I hope you liked this short tutorial. Stay tuned by signing up for my newsletter. If you have any questions/comments/proposals, feel free to shoot me a message on Twitter/Discord/Patreon. Happy coding!