Just run the ez_setup.py script in the Django distribution.
Django requires Python 2.3 or later. No other Python libraries are required for basic Django usage.
For a development environment – if you just want to experiment with Django – you don’t need to have a separate Web server installed; Django comes with its own lightweight development server. For a production environment, we recommend Apache 2 and mod_python, although Django follows the WSGI spec, which means it can run on a variety of server platforms.
If you want to use Django with a database, which is probably the case, you’ll also need a database engine. PostgreSQL is recommended, because we’re PostgreSQL fans, and MySQL, SQLite 3, and Oracle are also supported.
No. Django itself is guaranteed to work with any version of Python from 2.3 and higher.
If you use a Python version newer than 2.3, you will, of course, be able to take advantage of newer Python features in your own code, along with the speed improvements and other optimizations that have been made to the Python language itself. But the Django framework itself should work equally well on 2.3 as it does on 2.4 or 2.5.
Although we recommend mod_python for production use, you don’t have to use it, thanks to the fact that Django uses an arrangement called WSGI. Django can talk to any WSGI-enabled server. Other non-mod_python deployment setups are FastCGI, SCGI or AJP. See How to use Django with FastCGI, SCGI or AJP for full information.
Also, see the server arrangements wiki page for other deployment strategies.
If you just want to play around and develop things on your local computer, use the development Web server that comes with Django. Things should Just Work.
The Django developers improve Django every day and are pretty good about not checking in broken code. We use the development code (from the Subversion repository) directly on our servers, so we consider it stable. With that in mind, we recommend that you use the latest development code, because it generally contains more features and fewer bugs than the “official” releases.
Jul 30, 2009