Setting Django up to use MySQL

I want to move away from PHP a little and learn Python. In order to do web development with Python I'll need a framework to help with templating and other things. I have a non-production server that I use to test all of web development stuff on. It is a Debian 7.1 LAMP stack that runs MariaDB instead of the common MySQL-server package. Yesterday I installed Django and created my first project called *firstweb*. I have not changed any settings yet. Here is my first big piece of confusion. In the tutorial I followed the guy installed Django, started his first project, restarted Apache, and Django just worked from then on. He went to his browser and went to the Django default page with no problems. Me however, I have to cd into my firstweb folder and run python manage.py runserver myip:port And it works. No problem. But I'm wondering if it is supposed to work like this, and if this will cause problems down the line? My **second question** is that I want to set it up so it uses my MySQL database. I go into my settings.py under /firstweb/firstweb and I see ENGINE and NAME but I'm not sure what to put here. And then in the USER, PASSWORD, and HOST areas is this my database and its credentials? If I am using *localhost* can I just put *localhost* in the HOST area?