For people new to Django (or to programming in general) I tend to give people a challenge to write a tic-tac-toe game. This is my solution.

It's not only a working tic-tac-toe game, but it also includes many standard patterns used by Django apps such as unit testing models and views, importing modules, and testing with tox and Travis.

The easiest way to get this set up is to use virtualenv. Usually it's easy as:

sudo pip install virtualenv

Once you have virtualenv and the code, you can create a virtualenv and install the dependencies:

cd <path_to_code>
mkvirtualenv tictactoe
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then run the server:

python manage.py runserver

The game state is stored in the Game model. The board is stored as a 9 character string, with the option of having multiple player types:

class Game(models.Model):
    board = models.CharField(max_length=9, default=" " * 9)

    player_x = models.CharField(max_length=64)
    player_o = models.CharField(max_length=64)

You can see the rest of the logic of the same by checking out the models file: https://github.com/paulcwatts/django-tictactoe/blob/master/game/models.py

Each player is stored as a string which can either be "human" or the name of a class that implements the player logic. Player logic is separated out into classes of their own to maintain a good separation of roles. Right now there's only a player that plays randomly, but the intent is to create a new player that plays perfectly.

The UI for the game is fairly simplistic, and relies entirely on Django templates and views. It's not actually the way I would write it -- I'd create a front-end Javascript solution and use a JSON API to send and receive moves.

All of the code is tested, which is a good primer if you're new to testing Django applications: https://github.com/paulcwatts/django-tictactoe/tree/master/game/tests If you're unfamiliar with many of the testing tools available to Django apps, I have slides and code from a talk I did on testing Django).

Eventually I'd like to create a real Javascript front-end and API. But for now this was specifically about Django development.