New project to shorten django-admin to django because we are not monsters

December 14, 2024

One of the biggest mysteries in Django is why I have to run django-admin from my terminal instead of just running django. Confusingly, django-admin has nothing to do with Django’s admin app.

If you have ever wondered why and wanted to type django from your terminal, my new project, django-cli-no-admin solves this problem for you.

I looked for several package names on PyPI, including django-cli, which I liked the best (someone is name squatting this package.)

I gave up and went with django-cli-no-admin for lack of a better name.

# new school
uv pip install django-cli-no-admin

# old school
pip install django-cli-no-admin

# to use it...
django --version

This tool aliases Django’s django-admin script does but we shorted the name by 50%:

[project.scripts]
django = "django.core.management:execute_from_command_line"

Should Django adopt this?

Yes. But we can leave django-admin alone since we have ~20 years of history referencing it.

How long has this lived in your head?

Almost two decades.

Originally posted on: https://micro.webology.dev/2024/12/14/new-project-to.html