Understanding is one of the most important things when learning to code. And it's not the easiest — sometimes you just want to bang your head against the wall. That's what happened to me when I started to learn Django.

Here I want to show you what urls.py and views.py are for, and how they help a simple URL to become a full web page.

Let's figure it out:

Say we open https://cats.com/cats/ in our browser.

First thing, Django drops the domain from the URL and we are left with cats/. Then Django goes through the URL patterns in urls.py (aka the URL rule list) in an attempt to find a rule that would match.

And it finds one. It's a rule with name='cats'.

According to this rule, Django knows which view must be used to handle a request - it's views.show_all_cats.

Django calls the show_all_cats function (which comes from views.py). Which in turn renders the cats.html template.

(For more details about the dictionary in the render function, see What the curly hell do you pass into `render`?)

And finally, we are full of love for the beautiful purr-y creatures.

See also:

• The simple way to understand Django models