I understand. You are right about how to start the app. When we have a little bit of skill with python/django it's easier.

I'll try to improve that point in the doc but it's not simple ;)

So, once you made a (python) virtualenv (which is recommand) and source it (by doing source bin/activate) and install the whole application, start it by :

python manage.py runserver

On a production environment we use "supervisor" which permits to start everything automatically.

And finally, to avoid all of that glitch, I'm looking at docker.