I'm in the early innings of the development process and am trying to figure out best practices for structuring the template libraries for a website.

I plan to have a "base" template to extend across the site. I have seen some examples where a template directory is created at the project level to house this file, and others where a "base" file is created in one of the app folders and then extended to other apps as needed. Is there a correct way this should be done?

Thank you in advance for humoring me on this extremely basic question. Trying to get my feet under me for the first time.

For site projects I tend to make the project module itself (as created by startproject) an app too.

That way base templates, base models (such as a custom user model!), helper utility functions, etc. live in there, and one doesn't have to futz around with the filesystem template loaders at all - the default app-based template loader works fine.

That is, if my project is, say, grocerystore and it has two apps, drinks and foods (silly example but bear with me), the structure would be approximately

manage.py
grocerystore/__init__.pysettings/__init__.pymodels/__init__.pyuser.pyviews/__init__.pytemplates/base.html
foods/__init__.pyapps.pymodels/__init__.pyfood.pyviews/__init__.pyfood/__init__.pyfood_list_view.py__init__.pytemplates/foods/food_list.html
drinks/__init__.pyapps.pymodels/__init__.pydrink.py# ... etc ...

and INSTALLED_APPS would contain (along Django defaults) ('grocerystore', 'foods', 'drinks').

You can then simply {% extends "base.html" %} in your apps.

(Note, btw, that to be able to split models.py into a package, you have to make sure models/__init__.py imports the modules holding each model, so they're registered by Django!)