We now have to create the Django project for our ShapeEditor system. To do this, cd into the directory where you want the project's directory to be placed, and type the following:

% django-admin.py startproject shapeEditor

All going well, Django will create a directory named shapeEditor with the following contents:

Now that the project has been created, we need to configure it. To do this, edit the settings.py file in the shapeEditor package directory. We need to tell our project how to access the database we set up, and we also want to enable the GeoDjango extension.

Start by searching for the DATABASES variable, and change it to look like the following:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE'   : 'django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis',
        'NAME'     : 'shapeeditor',
        'USER'     : 'shapeeditor',
        'PASSWORD' : '...'
    }
}

Make sure you enter the password you set up for the shapeeditor Postgres user.

Next, search for the INSTALLED_APPS variable, and add the following to the end of the list of installed applications:

'django.contrib.gis',

While we're editing the settings.py file, let's make one more change that will save us some trouble down the track. Go to the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting, and comment out the django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware line. This entry causes the addition of extra error checking when processing forms to prevent cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Implementing CSRF support requires adding extra code to our form templates, which we won't be doing here in order to keep things simple.

This completes the configuration of our ShapeEditor project.