Improving Django Cache – Part I
Django is a Python framework for rapidly developing web applications. It’s loosely based on the “Model-View-Controller” programming paradigm. One of the great things about Django is it has several cache implementations built in. One of those implementations is for the very popular memcached. The base Django implementation for memcached is great, but there are few things that can be improved for it. This series of blog post will look at doing these improvements.
For this first post we are going to setup a custom cache implementation based on the current memcached implementation. Before you begin, you need to setup Django and start an application. The Quick install guide can help. You also need to get memcached setup. Once this is all setup we can start to create our custom cache backend.
- Create a file called cache.py in your application directory.
- Copy the current base implementation into your new cache file. http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/core/cache/backends/memcached.py
- Open you settings.py file
- Find the entry for “CACHE_BACKEND”. If you don’t have it then create one.
- Set CACHE_BACKEND equals to “cache://127.0.0.1:11211/”
Now your application should be running on your custom memcached implementation. In the next part of the series we will start to customize the file to improve upon it. Continue on to part II