# Django URLs

We're about to build our first webpage: a homepage for your blog! But first, let's learn a little bit about Django URLs.

## What is a URL? <a href="#what-is-a-url" id="what-is-a-url"></a>

A URL is a web address. You can see a URL every time you visit a website – it is visible in your browser's address bar. (Yes! `127.0.0.1:8000` is a URL! And `https://djangogirls.org` is also a URL.)

Every page on the Internet needs its own URL. This way your application knows what it should show to a user who opens that URL. In Django, we use something called `URLconf` (URL configuration). URLconf is a set of patterns that Django will try to match the requested URL to find the correct view.

## How do URLs work in Django? <a href="#how-do-urls-work-in-django" id="how-do-urls-work-in-django"></a>

Let's open up the `mysite/urls.py` file in your code editor of choice and see what it looks like:

mysite/urls.py

```
"""mysite URL Configuration

[...]
"""
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]
```

As you can see, Django has already put something here for us.

Lines between triple quotes (`'''` or `"""`) are called docstrings – you can write them at the top of a file, class or method to describe what it does. They won't be run by Python.

The admin URL, which you visited in the previous chapter, is already here:

mysite/urls.py

```
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
```

This line means that for every URL that starts with `admin/`, Django will find a corresponding *view*. In this case, we're including a lot of admin URLs so it isn't all packed into this small file – it's more readable and cleaner.

## Your first Django URL! <a href="#your-first-django-url" id="your-first-django-url"></a>

Time to create our first URL! We want '<http://127.0.0.1:8000/>' to be the home page of our blog and to display a list of posts.

We also want to keep the `mysite/urls.py` file clean, so we will import URLs from our `blog` application to the main `mysite/urls.py` file.

Go ahead, add a line that will import `blog.urls`. You will also need to change the `from django.urls…` line because we are using the `include` function here, so you will need to add that import to the line.

Your `mysite/urls.py` file should now look like this:

mysite/urls.py

```
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('', include('blog.urls')),
]
```

Django will now redirect everything that comes into '<http://127.0.0.1:8000/>' to `blog.urls` and looks for further instructions there.

## blog.urls <a href="#blogurls" id="blogurls"></a>

Create a new empty file named `urls.py` in the `blog` directory, and open it in the code editor. All right! Add these first two lines:

blog/urls.py

```
from django.urls import path
from . import views
```

Here we're importing Django's function `path` and all of our `views` from the `blog` application. (We don't have any yet, but we will get to that in a minute!)

After that, we can add our first URL pattern:

blog/urls.py

```
urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.post_list, name='post_list'),
]
```

As you can see, we're now assigning a `view` called `post_list` to the root URL. This URL pattern will match an empty string and the Django URL resolver will ignore the domain name (i.e., <http://127.0.0.1:8000/>) that prefixes the full URL path. This pattern will tell Django that `views.post_list` is the right place to go if someone enters your website at the '<http://127.0.0.1:8000/>' address.

The last part, `name='post_list'`, is the name of the URL that will be used to identify the view. This can be the same as the name of the view but it can also be something completely different. We will be using the named URLs later in the project, so it is important to name each URL in the app. We should also try to keep the names of URLs unique and easy to remember.

If you try to visit <http://127.0.0.1:8000/> now, then you'll find some sort of 'web page not available' message. This is because the server (remember typing `runserver`?) is no longer running. Take a look at your server console window to find out why.

Your console is showing an error, but don't worry – it's actually pretty useful: It's telling you that there is **no attribute 'post\_list'**. That's the name of the *view* that Django is trying to find and use, but we haven't created it yet. At this stage, your `/admin/` will also not work. No worries – we will get there. If you see a different error message, try restarting your web server. To do that, in the console window that is running the web server, stop it by pressing Ctrl+C (the Control and C keys together). On Windows, you might have to press Ctrl+Break. Then you need to restart the web server by running a `python manage.py runserver` command.

> If you want to know more about Django URLconfs, look at the official documentation: <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/topics/http/urls/>


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://djangogirls.nikz.in/project-part-2/django_urls.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.