Best practices before starting a project

While preparing a development environment, make sure that you have the following in place:

• A fresh Python virtual environment: Python 3 includes the venv module or you can install virtualenv. Both of them prevent polluting your global Python library. pipenv is the recommended tool (used in this book as well) for higher-level management of virtual environments and dependencies.
• Version control: Always use a version control tool such as Git or Mercurial. They are lifesavers. You can also make changes much more confidently and fearlessly.
• Choose a project template: Django's default project template is not the only option. Based on your needs, try other templates such as Edge (https://github.com/arocks/edge) by yours truly or use Cookiecutter (https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django).
• Deployment pipeline: I usually worry about this a bit later, but having a fast deployment process speeds up development. I prefer Fabric (it has a Python 3 fork called fabric3) or Ansible.