You're probably wondering what the heck I'm talking about when I say app.

Didn't we just make an app?

Haven't we been working on an app all along?

Well, yes and no.

Django has long had this concept of plugable apps.

Let's break those two words down though.

An app is a self contained bit of functionality like a system for

comments or a way to reference files from Google Drive.

So for example, if we end up building a solid learning library tool,

one that other people could easily use and adapt to their own needs, we might release

it as an app for other Django nuts to install into their projects and use.

And that brings us to the other word, pluggable, or Django apps that can be

moved from project to project usually by installing them from the Cheese Shop.

Since these apps can be plugged into your project we say that they're plugable.

So a single project is made up of usually multiple apps.

This is a good thing because it means you often don't have to build a large part

of your project.

And who doesn't like extra time off?

So to create an app we're gonna use the manage.piescript again.

This time we are gonna use the start app command,

and the name of the app that we want to create.

App names are usually the plural form of the main model

that your app is going to be about.

I like this convention because it means that you need to have a bit more

thought put into your work before you just jump in.

Normally we're like yeah let's go do something but

often it's a really good idea to plan things out a little bit.

You can of course rename things later if you change your mind.

So, our main model is going to be for a course, so let's name the app, courses.

So we're gonna kill the server there.

Pythonmanage.py.

Start app.

Courses.

Again, no feedback.

That's cool that's fine.

Let's run our server again so we don't forget about it.

Okay, come over here and refresh our file tree, and

now we see we have a courses directory.

So lets look in there.

Okay, so its at the same level as our

learning site stub all of our apps are going to live next to each other.

If we had more apps.

Right now we only have one.

And its not really surprising its named courses that's what

we told it to be called.

Inside of there we have an admin.py we have models.py, test.py, and views.py.

We also have a folder called migrations currently though its empty it just has

the standard init.py in there.

Those init.pi files, by the way, if you don't already know,

mark a directory as being a Python module, they're what let us do imports and

things like that with files that are inside of these directories.

Most of the time, they are 100% blank.

We'll explore all of these files in the rest of this course, but for

now, let's just get the app added into our project.

We do that by opening up settings.py, and if you hear

me say something about like our settings file, this is what I'm talking about.

This file has a lot of stuff in it, and we don't need to worry about most of it.

About half way down though there is a tuple called installed apps,

and this thing we need to edit.

So down here at the bottom, after all of Django's apps,

we're going to add courses and we're going to end it with a comma,

because it's a good chance we're going to add more apps later.

Even if you don't, it's still a good idea to always add that comma.

Trailing commas are a pretty good habit to pick up when you're writing Python, but

I am going to apologize now if they cause you just

all sorts of head aches in other languages like JavaScript.

Okay, one more thing that I like to change is,

if we come down just a little bit farther, you will see

A, there it is, time zone.

So the time zones are a little picky.

They are a specific set of time zones.

They're a fairly standard set, but you can't just put in,

like, PST for Pacific Standard Time.

I'll put a link in the teacher notes for all the possible timezones.

I'm gonna change mine since I'm on the west coast.

I'm gonna change this to America/Los_Angeles.

All right, if you want to change the timezone, go for it.

Change it to whatever your local timezone is and this way if we're using dates or

times in our project, they'll be correct.

It probably feels like I stopped just when things got interesting, huh?

I wanna give you a little bit of time to let projects and apps settle in.

Also, this just means the next stage will be even more exciting.