Building your own shop¶
For simplicity, let’s assume you’re building a new e-commerce project from
scratch and have decided to use Oscar. Let’s call this project frobshop
Tip
You can always review the set-up of the Sandbox site in case you have trouble with the below instructions.
Install Oscar and its dependencies¶
Install Oscar (which will install Django as a dependency), then create the project:
$ mkvirtualenv oscar
$ pip install django-oscar[sorl-thumbnail]
$ django-admin startproject frobshop
If you do not have mkvirtualenv, you can use instead:
$ python3 -m venv oscar
$ . ./oscar/bin/activate
(oscar) $ pip install django-oscar[sorl-thumbnail]
(oscar) $ django-admin startproject frobshop
This will create a folder frobshop
for your project. It is highly
recommended to install Oscar in a virtualenv.
Tip
sorl-thumbnail
is an optional dependency for image thumbnail, but is what Oscar expects
to use by default. It can be replaced with easy-thumbnails
or a custom thumbnail backend. If you want to
use a different backend then remember to change the OSCAR_THUMBNAILER
setting to point to it.
Attention
Please ensure that pillow
, a fork of the the Python Imaging Library
(PIL), gets installed with JPEG support. Supported formats are printed
when pillow
is first installed.
Instructions on how to get JPEG support are highly platform specific,
but guides for PIL
should work for pillow
as well. Generally
speaking, you need to ensure that libjpeg-dev
is installed and found
during installation.
Django settings¶
First, edit your settings file frobshop/frobshop/settings.py
to import all of Oscar’s default settings.
from oscar.defaults import *
Now add Oscar’s context processors to the template settings, listed below:
'oscar.apps.search.context_processors.search_form',
'oscar.apps.checkout.context_processors.checkout',
'oscar.apps.communication.notifications.context_processors.notifications',
'oscar.core.context_processors.metadata',
Next, modify INSTALLED_APPS
to be a list, and add django.contrib.sites
,
django.contrib.flatpages
, Oscar’s core apps, and third-party apps that Oscar
depends on. Also set SITE_ID
:
INSTALLED_APPS = [
'django.contrib.admin',
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.sessions',
'django.contrib.messages',
'django.contrib.staticfiles',
'django.contrib.sites',
'django.contrib.flatpages',
'oscar.config.Shop',
'oscar.apps.analytics.apps.AnalyticsConfig',
'oscar.apps.checkout.apps.CheckoutConfig',
'oscar.apps.address.apps.AddressConfig',
'oscar.apps.shipping.apps.ShippingConfig',
'oscar.apps.catalogue.apps.CatalogueConfig',
'oscar.apps.catalogue.reviews.apps.CatalogueReviewsConfig',
'oscar.apps.communication.apps.CommunicationConfig',
'oscar.apps.partner.apps.PartnerConfig',
'oscar.apps.basket.apps.BasketConfig',
'oscar.apps.payment.apps.PaymentConfig',
'oscar.apps.offer.apps.OfferConfig',
'oscar.apps.order.apps.OrderConfig',
'oscar.apps.customer.apps.CustomerConfig',
'oscar.apps.search.apps.SearchConfig',
'oscar.apps.voucher.apps.VoucherConfig',
'oscar.apps.wishlists.apps.WishlistsConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.apps.DashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.reports.apps.ReportsDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.users.apps.UsersDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.orders.apps.OrdersDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.catalogue.apps.CatalogueDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.offers.apps.OffersDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.partners.apps.PartnersDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.pages.apps.PagesDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.ranges.apps.RangesDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.reviews.apps.ReviewsDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.vouchers.apps.VouchersDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.communications.apps.CommunicationsDashboardConfig',
'oscar.apps.dashboard.shipping.apps.ShippingDashboardConfig',
# 3rd-party apps that oscar depends on
'widget_tweaks',
'haystack',
'treebeard',
'sorl.thumbnail', # Default thumbnail backend, can be replaced
'django_tables2',
]
SITE_ID = 1
Note that Oscar requires django.contrib.flatpages
which isn’t
included by default. flatpages
also requires django.contrib.sites
.
More info about installing flatpages
is in the Django docs.
Tip
Oscar’s default templates use django-widget-tweaks but it’s optional really. You may decide to use your own templates that don’t use either.
Next, add oscar.apps.basket.middleware.BasketMiddleware
and
django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware
to
your MIDDLEWARE
setting.
MIDDLEWARE = (
...
'oscar.apps.basket.middleware.BasketMiddleware',
'django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware',
)
Set your authentication backends to:
AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
'oscar.apps.customer.auth_backends.EmailBackend',
'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
)
to allow customers to sign in using an email address rather than a username.
Ensure that your media and static files are configured correctly. This means
at the least setting MEDIA_URL
and STATIC_URL
. If you’re serving files
locally, you’ll also need to set MEDIA_ROOT
and STATIC_ROOT
.
Check out the sandbox settings for a working example. If you’re serving
files from a remote storage (e.g. Amazon S3), you must manually copy a
“Image not found” image into MEDIA_ROOT
.
Search backend¶
If you’re happy with basic search for now, you can just add Haystack’s simple
backend to the HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS
option in your Django settings:
HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.simple_backend.SimpleEngine',
},
}
Oscar uses Haystack to abstract away from different search backends. Unfortunately, writing backend-agnostic code is nonetheless hard and Apache Solr is currently the only supported production-grade backend. Your Haystack config could look something like this:
HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.solr_backend.SolrEngine',
'URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr',
'INCLUDE_SPELLING': True,
},
}
Oscar includes a sample schema to get started with Solr. More information can be found in the recipe on getting Solr up and running.
Database¶
Check your database settings. A quick way to get started is to use SQLite:
DATABASES = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
'NAME': 'db.sqlite3',
'USER': '',
'PASSWORD': '',
'HOST': '',
'PORT': '',
'ATOMIC_REQUESTS': True,
}
}
Note that we recommend using ATOMIC_REQUESTS
to tie transactions to
requests.
URLs¶
Alter your frobshop/urls.py
to include Oscar’s URLs. You can also include
the Django admin for debugging purposes. But please note that Oscar makes no
attempts at having that be a workable interface; admin integration exists
to ease the life of developers.
If you have more than one language set your Django settings for LANGUAGES
,
you will also need to include Django’s i18n URLs:
from django.apps import apps
from django.urls import include, path
from django.contrib import admin
urlpatterns = [
path('i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),
# The Django admin is not officially supported; expect breakage.
# Nonetheless, it's often useful for debugging.
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
path('', include(apps.get_app_config('oscar').urls[0])),
]
Create database¶
Oscar ships with migrations. Django’s migration framework will detect them automatically and will do the right thing. Create the database and the shop should be browsable:
$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py runserver
You should now have an empty, but running Oscar install that you can browse at http://localhost:8000.
Initial data¶
The default checkout process requires a shipping address with a country. Oscar
uses a model for countries with flags that indicate which are valid shipping
countries and so the country
database table must be populated before
a customer can check out.
The easiest way to achieve this is to use country data from the pycountry package. Oscar ships with a management command to parse that data:
$ pip install pycountry
[...]
$ python manage.py oscar_populate_countries
By default, this command will mark all countries as a shipping country. Call
it with the --no-shipping
option to prevent that. You then need to
manually mark at least one country as a shipping country.
Creating product classes and fulfilment partners¶
Every Oscar deployment needs at least one
product class
and one
fulfilment partner
.
These aren’t created automatically as they’re highly specific to the shop you
want to build.
When managing your catalogue you should always use the Oscar dashboard, which provides the necessary functionality. Use your Django superuser email and password to login to: http://127.0.0.1:8000/dashboard/ and create instances of both there.
It is important to note that the Django admin site is not supported. It may or may not work and is only included in the sandbox for developer’s convenience.
For a deployment setup, we recommend creating product classes as data migration.
Defining the order pipeline¶
The order management in Oscar relies on the order pipeline that defines all the statuses an order can have and the possible transitions for any given status. Statuses in Oscar are not just used for an order but are handled on the line level as well to be able to handle partial shipping of an order.
The order status pipeline is different for every shop which means that
changing it is fairly straightforward in Oscar. The pipeline is defined in
your settings.py
file using the OSCAR_ORDER_STATUS_PIPELINE
setting.
You also need to specify the initial status for an order and a line item in
OSCAR_INITIAL_ORDER_STATUS
and OSCAR_INITIAL_LINE_STATUS
respectively.
To give you an idea of what an order pipeline might look like take a look at the Oscar sandbox settings:
OSCAR_INITIAL_ORDER_STATUS = 'Pending'
OSCAR_INITIAL_LINE_STATUS = 'Pending'
OSCAR_ORDER_STATUS_PIPELINE = {
'Pending': ('Being processed', 'Cancelled',),
'Being processed': ('Processed', 'Cancelled',),
'Cancelled': (),
}
Defining the order status pipeline is simply a dictionary of where each status is given as a key. Possible transitions into other statuses can be specified as an iterable of status names. An empty iterable defines an end point in the pipeline.
With these three settings defined in your project you’ll be able to see the different statuses in the order management dashboard.
Next steps¶
The next step is to implement the business logic of your domain on top of Oscar. The fun part.