Running the Django Tutorial on IronPython

The Django tutorial is fantastic. It's a great way to get a feel for Django, and a great test for how it will work on IronPython. Getting it working will give you pretty good idea of how to setup Django/IronPython for most things.
First, you'll need to install IronPython. Using the latest (IronPython 2.7 Beta 1 as of this writing) is recommended. The MSI installer is best, but you can use the zip as well. You'll just need to remember where it's unpacked, as you'll need that path later.
Next, you'll need to get Django/IronPython. Because Django requires some IronPython-specific patches, you'll need to download the entire source tree. To do this, you'll need Mercurial (I recommend TortoiseHG). Create an empty directory to work in, as well. I find Mercurial easier to work with from the command line, even with TortoiseHG installed, but you can do all of this from TortoiseHG as well. You’ll also need to enable MQ and, if you’re new to Mercurial, check out this quick tour of bibucket and this great Mercurial tutorial.
To get the Django/IronPython sources, from your empty directory:

> hg qclone http://bitbucket.org/jdhardy/django-ipy-patches django-ironpython
> pushd django-ironpython && hg qpush --all && popd
> md django-tutorial && cd django-tutorial

The first line pulls the sources from bitbucket into the 'django-ironpython' folder, the second line applies all of the Django/IronPython patches, and the last line creates a directory ('django-tutorial') to hold the tutorial files, and switches into it. If you're not already using the command line, open a command window and switch to the 'django-tutorial' directory.
Now we need to set up some environment variables, which are a simple way to configure some settings for IronPython and Django. I usually copy these into a file called 'tutenv.cmd', which is easier than typing them each time (the variables are lost when the command window is closed):

@echo off

rem Get the folder this file is in
set _root=%~dp0

rem Add the IronPython installation paths to PATH; change these if you used
rem the .zip version of IronPython
set PATH=C:\Program Files\IronPython 2.7;C:\Program Files (x86)\IronPython 2.7;%PATH%

rem Add the django path and current paths to IronPython's search list
set IRONPYTHONPATH=%_root%..\django-ironpython;%_root%;%_root%deps

rem Tell Django when the its settings are
set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings

If you created a file, run it to set up the tutorial environment. Now, do a quick sanity check:

> ipy
IronPython 2.7 Beta 1 (2.7.0.10) on .NET 4.0.30319.1
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import django
>>> ^Z

If that doesn't work, you need to make sure that the PATH variable includes your IronPython installation, and that IRONPYTHONPATH includes the path to the 'django-ironpython' folder created back at the beginning of the post.
Now we need to add in some dependencies (namely, sqlite and zlib support). These are in another bitbucket repository, django-ipy-tutorial-deps:

> hg clone http://bitbucket.org/jdhardy/django-ipy-tutorial-deps deps

Now you can start the tutorial. The first step, creating the project requires using django-admin.py; you can run it with IronPython like so:

> ipy ..\django-ironpython\django\bin\django-admin.py startproject mysite

Besides that, you can follow the tutorial almost exactly as written – just remember to substitute 'ipy' for 'python'! If you have any issues, please file them in the issue tracker.