Django community: RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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Beyond htmx: building modern Django apps with Alpine AJAX
I’ve recently been rethinking how I build web applications. For the past few years my default has been a Django backend serving a JSON API to a frontend built with SvelteKit. And I am not alone; many (if not most) sites now use a complex JavaScript frontend and a JSON API. This pattern, the Single-Page Application (SPA), brought us amazing user experiences, but it also brought a mountain of complexity: state management, API versioning, client-side routing, duplicate form validation, build tools, and the endless churn of the JavaScript ecosystem. And then I came across htmx, which promises to enhance HTML to the point where your old-fashioned Multi-Page Application (MPA) feels modern, without having to write a single line of JavaScript. We can have the smooth, modern UX of a SPA but with the simplicity and robustness of traditional, server-rendered Django applications. This article is about why I believe this “Hypermedia-Driven Application” approach is a better fit for many Django projects than a full-blown SPA, and why I ultimately chose Alpine AJAX over the more popular htmx. Returning to true REST and hypermedia To understand why this “new” approach feels so simple, we need to look back at the original principles … -
Migrating Python & Django Projects to uv
I recently migrated a legacy project that used requirements files to uv. I undertook the project in hopes of streamlining the setup process and to help to ensure that the versions of packages installed locally, in CI/CD, and in production are all consistent. uv manages everything about your Python environment, so I found it's best to start with uv's approach and integrate other tools as needed. Local development To migrate a legacy project to uv, I followed these steps. First, I added a project definition to our project's pyproject.toml: [project] name = "my-product" version = "1.2.3" description = "Our amazing product." readme = "README.md" requires-python = "~=3.12" dependencies = [] Then, I moved the requirements from our pre-existing requirements files to the project dependencies and removed the old files: uv add -r requirements/base.txt uv add -r requirements/dev.txt --group dev uv add -r requirements/deploy.txt --group deploy git rm requirements/*.txt This adds the base requirements to the dependencies list in pyproject.toml, and the dev and deploy requirements to the dev and deploy groups, respectively. Next, I installed and pinned a Python version, and synced the dependencies: uv python install 3.12 uv python pin 3.12 uv sync This installs a Python 3.12 interpreter, … -
PHP Web Frameworks - Roman Pronskiy
Roman’s personal site, GitHub, and YouTube channel The PHP FoundationThe New Life of PHP – The PHP Foundation PHP Annotated Newsletter PHP 3 to 8: The Evolution of a Codebase PHPStorm 2025.1 SponsorThis episode was brought to you by Buttondown, the easiest way to start, send, and grow your email newsletter. New customers can save 50% off their first year with Buttondown using the coupon code DJANGO. -
Django News - Django security releases issued: 5.2.2, 5.1.10, and 4.2.22 - Jun 6th 2025
News Django security releases issued: 5.2.2, 5.1.10, and 4.2.22 Django issues security patches in 5.2.2, 5.1.10, and 4.2.22, resolving a moderate severity log injection vulnerability in internal logging via unescaped request.path. djangoproject.com Python 3.13.4, 3.12.11, 3.11.13, 3.10.18 and 3.9.23 are now available! The Python 3.13.4 release includes over 300 bug fixes, and every version of Python has received three security updates. python.org django-unicorn - Request for maintainer(s) Django-unicorn seeks new maintainers to help evolve its interactive component library, address complexity, improve features, and support continued development within Django projects. dev.to Python Packaging Ecosystem Survey Participate in Anaconda’s survey to share your Python packaging experiences and resource preferences, helping guide future improvements in the packaging ecosystem. surveymonkey.com Updates to Django Today 'Updates to Django' is presented by Pradhvan from the Djangonaut Space! 🚀 Last week we had 3 pull requests merged into Django by 3 different contributors - including 1 first-time contributor! Congratulations to Jason Judkins for having their first commit merged into Django - welcome on board! 🥳 This week’s Django highlight: 🦄 Jason, updated the package name in Django's reusable apps tutorial to follow PEP 625 standards. Django Newsletter Wagtail CMS Closing the gap: strict CSP in the Django … -
Preserving referential integrity with JSON fields and Django
Preserving referential integrity with JSON fields and Django Motivation The great thing about using feincms3 and django-content-editor is that CMS plugins are Django models – if using them you immediately have access to the power of Django’s ORM and Django’s administration interface. However, using one model per content type can be limiting on larger sites. Because of this we like using JSON plugins with schemas for more fringe use cases or for places where we have richer data but do not want to write a separate Django app for it. This works well as long as you only work with text, numbers etc. but gets a bit ugly once you start referencing Django models because you never know if those objects are still around when actually using the data stored in those JSON fields. Django has a nice on_delete=models.PROTECT feature, but that of course only works when using real models. So, let’s bridge this gap and allow using foreign key protection with data stored in JSON fields! Models First, you have to start using the django-json-schema-editor and specifically its JSONField instead of the standard Django JSONField. The most important difference between those two is that the schema editor’s field wants … -
An easy way to use different serializers for different actions and request methods in Django REST Framework
Imagine a simple Django REST Framework serializer and view like this: from rest_framework import serializers from rest_framework import viewsets from .models import Post class PostSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer): class Meta: model = Post fields = "__all__" class PostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet): serializer_class = PostSerializer def get_queryset(self): return Post.objects.all() The PostSerializer class is used for everything: the list of posts, retrieving a single post, the payload when creating or updating a post, and the response when creating or updating a post. I find that this is often not what I want; for example I often want a simple version of the model to be returned in the list endpoint (/posts/), while the full model is returned in the retrieve endpoint (/posts/{post_id}/). And I also often want that the input serializer is different from the output serializer, when creating or updating something (especially when using DRF’s built-in Browsable API, because it includes all the read-only fields in the example input payload, causing confusion). Using different serializers in the list and retrieve endpoints isn’t too hard: class PostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet): def get_serializer_class(self): if self.action == "list": return PostListSerializer return PostDetailSerializer But when you also want to use different input and output serializers when creating and updating models, then you need to … -
Changing Directions
Two announcements: (1) I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”. (2) As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of topics that interest me (projects around my hobby farm, wilderness trips, emergency medicine) – more writing for me, less writing for some imagined audience. (I’ll probably still end up writing about some of the same topics as I’ve been covering since 2020, just less often.) I’m writing this post mostly to give myself permission to make that change, and to give readers the opportunity to unsubscribe/unfollow if they’re not interested. -
Django News - DjangoCon US Early Bird Tickets - May 30th 2025
News Python Release Python 3.14.0b2 Python 3.14.0b2 beta introduces deferred type annotations, t-string templating, improved error messages, and remote debugging support that may influence Django project testing. python.org Updates to Django Fixed #35629 -- Added support for async database connections and cursors. Enhances Django's ORM with asynchronous database connections and low-level cursor support for executing raw SQL queries, improving async performance and transaction management. github.com Wagtail CMS What’s new in Wagtail - May 2025 highlights May 2025 Wagtail update for Django developers details LTS release enhancements with autosave progress, dynamic StreamField previews, improved accessibility and active community contributions. wagtail.org Sponsored Link 1 Open a Django office in Bulgaria with HackSoft! Looking to expand your operations? We offer end-to-end support in setting up your Django development office. Learn more! hacksoft.io Articles Faster Python Docker Builds Optimize Django and Python Docker builds by caching dependencies, using uv pip, and multi-stage builds to drastically reduce fresh build and rebuild times. revsys.com How I'm bundling frontend assets using Django and rspack these days Using rspack for frontend asset bundling in Django enables efficient hot module reloading, content-based cache busting, and streamlined production builds via reusable configuration snippets. 406.ch Another Great PyCon PyCon US 2025 … -
Django Deployments in 2025 - Eric Matthes
Python Crash Course, 3rd Editiondjango-simple-deployMostly Python NewsletterDjango From First Principles SeriesDJP: A Plugin System for Djangodsd-vpsdjango-productionSponsorThis episode was brought to you by Buttondown, the easiest way to start, send, and grow your email newsletter. New customers can save 50% off their first year with Buttondown using the coupon code DJANGO. -
DjangoCon Europe 2025 Highlights
Three Cakti recently attended DjangoCon Europe 2025 in Dublin and it was a wonderful experience! It was great to see and chat with various Django community members we usually only see once or twice a year. Beyond that, we were most impressed by the consistently high quality of the talks throughout all three days of the conference. It was a pleasure to listen to so many excellent presentations, including the lightning talks at the end of each day. Here are some of our favorite talks. Karen Tracey It is hard to pick out a single favorite, so I am going to mention a few: Tim Bell from Kraken Technologies Australia gave a talk on Converting integer fields to bigint using Django migrations at scale, followed up by a lightning talk a couple of days later that revealed how the real life production situation which was the inspiration for the talk was quite a near thing and required some daring creativity to sidestep disaster. I hope never to be in a similar situation but I do find talks on solving challenging production problems very enjoyable. In a similar vein, Mia Bajić presented a keynote on The Most Bizarre Software Bugs in … -
How I'm bundling frontend assets using Django and rspack these days
How I’m bundling frontend assets using Django and rspack these days I last wrote about configuring Django with bundlers in 2018: Our approach to configuring Django, Webpack and ManifestStaticFilesStorage. An update has been a long time coming. I wanted to write this down for a while already, but each time I started explaining how configuring rspack is actually nice I look at the files we’re using and switch to writing about something else. This time I managed to get through – it’s not that bad, I promise. This is quite a long post. A project where all of this can be seen in action is Traduire, a platform for translating gettext catalogs. I announced it on the Django forum. Our requirements The requirements were still basically the same: Hot module reloading during development A process which produces hashed filenames depending on their content so that we can use far-future expiry headers to cache assets in browsers While running Node.js in development is fine we do not want Node.js on the server (in the general case) We still want transpiling and bundling for now We have old projects using SASS. These days we’re only using PostCSS (especially autoprefixer and maybe postcss-nesting. … -
Django News - Django Sprints on the Med? - May 23rd 2025
News Django sprints? On the Med? A new initiative from Carlton Gibson and Paolo Melchiorre to organize three-day development sprints to get together and work on Django. buttondown.com DjangoCon US early-bird tickets are going fast! DjangoCon US 2025 early-bird tickets are now available at discounted rates through May for individuals and corporate attendees in Chicago. djangocon.us Django Commons launched a website! Django Commons launched their new website. django-commons.org Django Fellow Report Django Fellow Report - Natalia Bidart 3 triaged tickets, 8 reviewed, 1 authored, plus a lot of misc! djangoproject.com Django Fellow Report - Sarah Boyce 18 tickets triaged, 19 reviewed, plus misc! djangoproject.com Django Software Foundation Our Google Summer of Code 2025 contributors Google Summer of Code 2025 contributors will implement keyboard shortcuts and command palette in Django Admin, integrate template partials into core and automate contribution workflows. djangoproject.com Updates to Django Today 'Updates to Django' is presented by Pradhvan from the Djangonaut Space!🚀 Last week we had 20 pull requests merged into Django by 16 different contributors - including 4 first-time contributors! Congratulations to savanto, Kashemir001, Pablo Bengoechea and Samuel Cormier-Iijima for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board! 🎉 This week’s Django highlights … -
Django, JavaScript modules and importmaps
How I’m using Django, JavaScript modules and importmaps together I have been spending a lot of time in the last few months working on django-prose-editor. First I’ve rebuilt the editor on top of Tiptap because I wanted a framework for extending the underlying ProseMirror and didn’t want to reinvent this particular wheel. While doing that work I noticed that using JavaScript modules in the browser would be really nice, but Django’s ManifestStaticFilesStorage doesn’t yet support rewriting import statement in modules out-of-the-box without opting into the experimental support accessible through subclassing the storage. A better way to use JavaScript modules with the cache busting offered by ManifestStaticFilesStorage would be importmaps. Motivation Developing Django applications that include JavaScript has always been challenging when it comes to properly distributing, loading, and versioning those assets. The traditional approach using Django’s forms.Media works well for simple use cases, but falls short when dealing with modern JavaScript modules. The ability to ship reusable JavaScript utilities in third-party Django apps has been a pain point for years. Often developers resort to workarounds like bundling all JS into a single file, using jQuery-style global variables, or requiring complex build processes for consumers of their apps. Importmaps offer a … -
Django is not a framework but a Protocol
This has been a concept that has been brewing in my mind for the last couple of months. It's been mostly inspired by my desire to see a prodserver (final name TBC) in Django Core alongside runserver and why it sitting happily as third-party package would, to me, not be a sufficient solution. As part of some research on potential names for commands I dug into the django-tasks DEP to understand how the worker would be started. My findings found that it will be currently left to future iterations with the current solution delegated to the implementation (read a third-party package). Additionally Carlton's talk at DjangoCon Europe this year teased at the idea of modularization, how can we break up Django for some aspects to ship faster. I too have toyed this with in the past in regard to the contrib module. Carlton has also written about Django having a grain, a natural way of working, to the extent that I would say we have Djangonic?! code in addition to code being Pythonic. Finally to reference the Zen of Python: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. This has become harder to see as … -
Weeknotes (2025 week 21)
Weeknotes (2025 week 21) I have missed two co-writing sessions and didn’t manage to post much outside of that, but let’s get things back on track. django-prose-editor 0.12 The last weeknotes entry contains more details about the work of really connecting Tiptap extensions with server-side sanitization. 0.12 includes many improvements and bugfixes which have been made during real-world use of the prose editor in customer-facing products. I’m not completely happy about the way we’re specifying the editor configuration and haven’t been able to settle on either extensions or config as a keyword argument. The field supports both ways, at least for now. It’s probably fine. Releases django-auto-admin-fieldsets 0.2: I wrote a blog post here: Customizing Django admin fieldsets without fearing forgotten fields django-debug-toolbar 5.2: This release contains the second half of improvements from Djangonaut Space session four where I helped out as a Navigator. The toolbar properly supports code highlighting in dark mode, sanitizes request variables better, allows customizing redirects, supports projects using django-template-partials and more! FeinCMS 25.5.1: The first FeinCMS release of 2025. We’re still maintaining the project and fixing bugs! django-prose-editor 0.12: See above. django-json-schema-editor 0.4.1: Fixes much too small checkboxes when used inside tables. -
Python: a quick cProfile recipe with pstats
Python comes with two built-in profilers for measuring the performance of your code: cProfile and profile. They have the same API, but cProfile is a C extension, while profile is implemented in Python. You nearly always want to use cProfile, as it’s faster and doesn’t skew measurements as much. By default, cProfile’s CLI profiles a command and displays its profile statistics afterwards. But that can be a bit limited, especially for reading large profiles or re-sorting the same data in different ways. For more flexibility, cProfile can instead save the profile data to a file, which you can then read with the pstats module. This is my preferred way of using it, and this post covers a recipe for doing so, with a worked example. The recipe First, profile your script: $ python -m cProfile -o profile <script> [args] Replace <script> with the path to your Python file, and [args] with any arguments you want to pass to it. cProfile will run your script under its profiling machinery, saving the results to a file called profile, as specified by the -o option. Second, view the profile file using pstats: $ python -m pstats profile <<< $'sort cumtime\nstats 1000' | less … -
Django News - Django News is at PyCon US this weekend! - May 16th 2025
Introduction Django News is at PyCon US this weekend! Jeff and Will are at PyCon US in Pittsburgh this weekend and would love to meet fellow Django enthusiasts. Drop by the DSF or JetBrains booth to say hello and connect with the many Django community members and DSF folks who will be around all weekend. Django Newsletter News Google Summer of Code 2025 - Django Projects Three projects out of many worth proposals were accepted. Improvements to Django admin, adding django-template-partials to core, and automating processes in the Django contribution workflow. withgoogle.com Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O Postgres 18 introduces asynchronous I/O with new io_method options (worker and io_uring), which can double or triple read performance in high-latency cloud environments. pganalyze.com Django Software Foundation Simon Charette is the DSF member of the month Simon Charette is a longtime Django contributor and community member. He served on the Django 5.x Steering Council and is part of the Security team and the Triage and Review team. djangoproject.com Updates to Django Today 'Updates to Django' is presented by Abigail Afi Gbadago from the DSF Board and Djangonaut Space!🚀 Last week we had 10 pull requests merged into Django … -
My second DjangoCon Europe
Well I have been meaning to write this for over 2 weeks now, but better late than never! Towards the end of April 2025 I attended the DjangoCon Europe conference and Sprints and it was brilliant and exhausting all in one go. Let's begin with the travel there, I decided to join those doing the SailRail for a relaxed train ride and crossing the sea to Dublin. This was great as I managed to make some use of the day (work and a blog post) while travelling as well as having some travel companions in the form of Thibaud, Sage, Tom & Daniele. The next day kicked off the conference with an excellent keynote from Sarah Boyce, and other talks followed thoughout the next 2 days. Databases was a big theme along with community engagement and HTMX. However for me it was walking into the room and meeting folks from the community in person, that I have interacted with online for the past couple of years. This was also coupled with great conversations with friends new & old (mostly around making Django better). I also plucked up the courage and gave a lighting talk on the last day about my … -
Pygrunn: how to solve a python mystery - Aivars Kalvāns
(One of my summaries of the 2025 pygrunn conference in Groningen, NL). Aivars pointed at https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html as a good overview of linux tools A good start is the /proc filesystem, you can use it to gather information on processes, for instance to grab the environment used by a process: $ cat /proc/1234455/environ || tr '\0' '\n' The files/sockets used by a specific process: $ ls /proc/12345/fd/* You might have an unfindable file that takes up lots of space (like a logfile that has been deleted from a directory, but that is still open in some program). The command above will have (deleted) next to deleted files, so you can search for that string in the output to find the process that still has such a big file open. Another handy tool: strace, it traces linux system kernel calls. You don't even need root access if you just want to trace your own processes. An example command: $ strace -f -ttt -o output.txt -s 1024 -p <PID> $ strace -f -ttt -o output.txt -s 1024 -p your-new-process.sh If your code does a system call ("read something from somewhere"), strace prints both the start and the end of the call. So you … -
Pygrunn: team alignment, enterprise design power - Edzo A. Botjes
(One of my summaries of the 2025 pygrunn conference in Groningen, NL). He helps startups to design their business. He's got more info at https://www.edzob.com/page/enterprise/ , an "enterprise design cheat sheet". He was a consultant for a long time and started noticing patterns. He's now in education/research and he's focused on culture. According to Osterwalder, success = value proposition + uniqueness + business model + timing + team alignment. In Edzo's experience, the team alignment is often a core problem. As a person, you have a skill set (behaviour and capabilities). As a team, you have a collective toolset: (structure, processes, data and tech). Those two are the tangible stuff. Intangible is your mindset (attitude and motivation) as a person, and the culture as a team. UX is a social contract between an app and the user. There's a social contract behind the interactions within the company. A culture. How do you want to collaborate? How you collaborate defines what you're going to be building. Conway's law. (He mentioned his talk of last year about this subject). His wife did a PhD about the meaning behind fairy tales. For him, as a technical person, the idea of having multiple meanings … -
Pygrunn: django template LSP, smarter completion for django templates - Kees Hink
(One of my summaries of the 2025 pygrunn conference in Groningen, NL). Henk works at four digits, a long-time django shop. He had a poll at the start about peoples' favourite editor. The top three: pycharm 38%, vscode 37%, neovim 11%. (Bugger, my favourite, emacs, is not in the top three). Code completion is nice. Modern editors are real handy for this with good support for django and python. But... for django templates, it is missing. No auto-completion for {% bl to {% block. And also no knowledge of the available variables and attributes. Pycharm is an exception, it has django language support and completion for the standard django template tags and also auto-complete in case you have class-based views. He showed us django template LSP: https://github.com/fourdigits/django-template-lsp, wich implements similar functionality for most other editors. It also picks up custom template tags. Docker support! It can find your template tags and code inside a docker image. When something is not picked up, you can add a comment with a type hint. You can install it from vscode, the name is djlsp. You can build such a LSP, Language Server Protocol, yourself. LSP allows a client (your IDE) to interface with … -
Pygrunn: cloud native geospatial formats for field boundaries - Ivor Bosloper
(One of my summaries of the 2025 pygrunn conference in Groningen, NL). Cloud native geospatial file formats: Geospatial data: you have raster data (= images) and vector data. And point data. Raster data: geotiff, png, jpg. Vector: (shapefiles), gpkg, geoparquet. Points: gpkg, geoparquet. Cloud native? Let's look at geotiff for instance. Just the old .tiff format, so a raster of pixels with some metadata. A geotiff has metadata like extent, projection, etc. There is a cloud native variant, cloud optimized geotiff. You have tiles, so the big image is subdivided into tiles for easier/cheaper/faster loading. There are also multiple versions of the image at various "zoom levels". The metadata is always at a fixed place in the file, right at the front or at the back. Such a cloud optimized format means that it is optimized for remote geospatial access patterns. The way it happens is with "http range requests". After reading the metadata for the file, the algorithm knows which parts of the big file to request from the server with such a http range request. He wanted to do the same for vector data. An approach is GeoParquet. Parquet is a bit of a "csv format", simplified. For … -
Pygrunn: python on a tractor - Wieneke Keller, Sebastian Lenartowicz
(One of my summaries of the 2025 pygrunn conference in Groningen, NL). How to become an apple farmer in 5 minutes: You want mid-size apples, as they fetch the best price. You want blossom on your tree, but not too much. Otherwise the tree has to divide its water and nourishment over more apples, which makes them smaller... They work at aurea imaging, maker of "treescout". The treescout is a device/camera on top of a tractor that drives along the apple trees in an orchard. The device detects the tree, blossoms and other attributes of the tree. The first use case: blossom thinning to aim at the right size of apples. Blossom thinning happens with a sprayer. The blossom blossoms for just two or three weeks. The first season they tried their project was educational. Lots or problems :-) GPS tracks that were not straight. Detected trees were not in the right location. Etcetera. Some of the challenges: It is on a vehicle, so limited power. It is on a farm, so very limited or no connectivity. Agricultural standards are actually from the maritime industry. GPS that is accurate within a few meters is fine, there. But not detailed enough … -
Pygrunn keynote: Homo ludens, python and play - Daniele Procida
(One of my summaries of the 2025 pygrunn conference in Groningen, NL). Organizing a conference is a weird mix between it-is-not-my-job and it-is-a-lot-of-real-work. When Daniele Procida learned python 16 years ago, he was often told that learning python is fun! And it is easy! Often when people say it is fun and easy, that you should be suspicious. It actually wasn't fun. There was lots of satisfaction, though. Solving problems is nice. He didn't want to have fun and he didn't want to be a great programmer: He just wanted to solve problems! Fun, playful... Python early on had a bit of playfulness. Named after Monty Python, an old BBC comedic television series. Nowadays most people haven't seen Monty Python on television and actually discover it through the programming language. How does an Indonesian teenager react to the unknown Monty Python jokes? Same with python-the-snakes. Lots of book with snakes on the cover. Some playful, some aggressive. Some with dripping venom (that doesn't fit with a constricting type of snake...). But try talking about "python" in African countries where Pythons actually are a menace... His definition of humor: the surprising violation of an expectation of congruity. A momentary re-ordering of … -
Event Sourcing - Chris May
Everyday Superpowers*Chris on Fosstodon and BlueSkyWhy I Finally Embraced Event Sourcing and You Should TooDjangoCon US 2023: HTML-ivating your Django web app's experience with HTMX, AlpineJS, and streaming HTMLSponsorThis episode was brought to you by HackSoft, your development partner beyond code. From custom software development to consulting, team augmentation, or opening an office in Bulgaria, they’re ready to take your Django project to the next level!
