Select File > New > Project from the top menu and then select a Python web project from the dropdown on the left. You should see something like Figure G.6. Select a Blank Django Web Project, give your project a name and then click OK:

Figure G.6: Create a blank Django project

Visual Studio will then display a popup window saying that this project requires external packages (Figure G.7). The simplest option here is to install directly into a virtual environment (option 1), but this will install the latest version of Django, which at the time of writing is 1.9.7. As this book is for the 1.8 LTS version we want to select option 3 I will install them myself so we can make the necessary changes to the requirements.txt file:

Figure G.7: Install external packages

Once the project has installed, you will notice in Solution Explorer on the right of the VS screen the complete Django project structure has been created for you. Next step is to add a virtual environment running Django 1.8. At the time of writing the latest version is 1.8.13, so we have to edit our requirements.txt file so the first line reads:

django==1.8.13 

Save the file and then right click Python Environments in your Solution Explorer and select Add Virtual Environment... (Figure G.8):

Figure G.8: Add virtual environment

In the popup window, change the default environment name from env to something more meaningful (if you are following on from the example in Chapter 1, Introduction to Django and Getting Started, use env_mysite). Click Create and VS will create a virtual environment for you (Figure G.9):

Figure G.9: Create the virtual environment