Editor’s Note：This article was written by Sunitha Muthukrishna, a program manager on the Windows Azure Sites team.

According to the application you write，Windows Azure Website may or may not include all the modules or libraries your application needs.

Don’t worry ，in this blog post，I’ll go into detail about using Virtualenv and Python Tools< for Visual Studio /span>Steps to create a Python environment for your application. In the meantime, I’ll also show you how to publish a Django based site to a Windows Azure website.

Create a Windows Azure website using a MySQL database

，Log in now span>Azure Management Portal，Create a new website using the Custom create option. For more information, see How to create an Azure website. We will create an empty website using a MySQL database.

Finally select the region ，After choosing to accept the website terms， the installation can be completed. As usual it is recommended that you place your database in the same region as your website to keep costs down.

Double-click your site in the admin portal to view the site’s dashboard. Click “Download publish profile”. The .publishsettings file will download，This file can be used for deployment in Visual Studio.

Create a Django project

In this tutorial we will use Visual Studio to build Django Web app. To build applications using Visual Studio, install PTVS 2.0. For more information, see How to build Django using Visual Studio Applications

Open Visual Studio and create a new project，by clicking New Project>Other Languages>Python > DjangoProject

Create a new Django application for your Django project in Solution Explorer by right-clicking DjangoProject > Add > DjangoApp

Enter the name of the Django application，for examplemyblog

Create Virtual Environment

Simply put, you can create a custom isolated Python through virtualenv environment. That means ，you can customize and install different packages，without affecting the rest of the site，so this environment can also be used for conducting experiments.

In Solution Explorer, right-click Python Environments in the Django project and select “Add Virtual Environment”

Enter the virtual environment name – for example “env”. This will create a folder named “env” which contains your virtual Python environment but does not contain any Python packages other than pip

In the virtual environment Install the MySQL-Python and Django packages in

In Solution Explorer，right-click on environment env and Install Python package：django

You can view the output of the Django installation in a virtual environment

Similarly，you Mysql-python is required to be installed but please use easy_install instead of pip as shown here

<img src="https://img.pa;

· First，add'django.contrib.admin' tosettings. INSTALLED_APPSSettings

INSTALLED_APPS = (

'django.contrib.auth',

&# 39;django.contrib.contenttypes',

'django.contrib.sessions',

'django.contrib.sites',

'django.contrib.messages',

'django.contrib.staticfiles',

'myblog',

)

· Now ，updatedurls.py， A request for the home page view.

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url

#import admin module

from django.contrib import admin

admin.autodiscover()

#set url patterns to handle requests made to yourapplication

urlpatterns = patterns('',

url(r'^$','DjangoApplication.views.home', name='home'),    

url(r'^admin/',include(admin.site.urls)),

)

· Next，We create admin.py in the myblog/ folder to register the Post model

from models import Post

from django.contrib import admin

#Register the database model so it will be visible in theAdmin site

admin.site.register(Post)

Build page Views

We will create a page view that lists all the blog posts you have created. To create a page view， please add the views.py file to the myblog/ folder

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

from models import Post

#Creating a view for the home page

def home(request):

posts = Post.objects.all()

#Renders a given template with a givencontext dictionary and

returns an

#HttpResponse object with that renderedtext.

return render_to_response('home.html',{'posts':posts} )

Displaying the Post object is not very helpful to the user，We need a more informative page to display the post list. In this case you will need to use a template. Usually “templates are used to generate HTML” but Django templates can also generate any text-based format.

To create this template， you first need to create a file named templates< under myblog/ /strong> directory. To display all articles in views.py， please create home.html under the templates/ folder strong>，It will traverse and display all Post objects.