Django React Boilerplate

About

A Django project boilerplate/template with a multitude of state-of-the-art libraries and tools. If pairing Django with React is a possibility for your project or spinoff, this is the best solution available. Save time with tools like:

• React, for building interactive UIs
• TypeScript, for static type checking
• Poetry, for managing the environment and its dependencies
• django-js-reverse, for generating URLs on JS
• Tailwind, for responsive styling
• Webpack, for bundling static assets
• Celery, for background worker tasks
• WhiteNoise with brotlipy, for efficient static files serving
• ruff and ESLint with pre-commit for automated quality assurance (does not replace proper testing!)

For continuous integration, a Github Action configuration .github/workflows/main.yml is included.

Also, includes a Render.com render.yaml and a working Django production.py settings, enabling easy deployments with 'Deploy to Render' button. The render.yaml includes the following:

• PostgreSQL, for DB
• Redis, for Celery

Features Catalogue

Frontend

• react for building interactive UIs
• react-dom for rendering the UI
• react-router for page navigation
• webpack for bundling static assets
• webpack-bundle-tracker for providing the bundled assets to Django
• Styling
  • tailwind for providing responsive stylesheets
• State management and backend integration
  • axios for performing asynchronous calls
  • cookie for easy integration with Django using the csrftoken cookie
  • openapi-ts for generating TypeScript client API code from the backend OpenAPI schema
  • history for providing browser history to Connected React Router
• Utilities
  • lodash for general utility functions
  • classnames for easy working with complex CSS class names on components
  • react-refresh for improving QoL while developing through automatic browser refreshing

Backend

• django for building backend logic using Python
• djangorestframework for building a REST API on top of Django
• drf-spectacular for generating an OpenAPI schema for the Django REST API
• django-webpack-loader for rendering the bundled frontend assets
• django-js-reverse for easy handling of Django URLs on JS
• django-upgrade for automatically upgrading Django code to the target version on pre-commit
• django-guid for adding a unique correlation ID to log messages from Django requests
• psycopg for using PostgreSQL database
• sentry-sdk for error monitoring
• python-decouple for reading environment variables on settings files
• celery for background worker tasks
• django-csp for setting the draft security HTTP header Content-Security-Policy
• django-permissions-policy for setting the draft security HTTP header Permissions-Policy
• django-defender for blocking brute force attacks against login
• whitenoise and brotlipy for serving static assets

Share your project!

Several people have leveraged our boilerplate to start spinoffs or to boost their efforts in the challenging pursuit of securing funding. Starting with a solid foundation allows you to create more resilient products and focus on what really matters: discovering and delivering value to your customers. If you are one of those people, we're eager to help you even more! We can spread the word about your project across our social media platforms, giving you access to a broader audience.

Send us an email at contact@vintasoftware.com telling us a bit more about how our boilerplate helped you boost your project.

Project bootstrap

• Make sure you have Python 3.12 installed
• Install Django with pip install django, to have the django-admin command available
• Open the command line and go to the directory you want to start your project in
• Start your project using (replace project_name with your project name and remove the curly braces):

  django-admin startproject {{project_name}} --extension py,json,yml,yaml,toml --name Dockerfile,README.md,.env.example,.gitignore,Makefile,.npmrc --template=https://github.com/vintasoftware/django-react-boilerplate/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
  

  Alternatively, you may start the project in the current directory by placing a . right after the project name, using the following command:

  django-admin startproject {{project_name}} . --extension py,json,yml,yaml,toml --name Dockerfile,README.md,.env.example,.gitignore,Makefile,.npmrc --template=https://github.com/vintasoftware/django-react-boilerplate/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
  

In the next steps, always remember to replace {{project_name}} with your project's name (in case it isn't yet):

• Above: don't forget the --extension and --name params!
• Go into project's root directory: cd {{project_name}}
• Change the first line of README to the name of the project
• Add an email address to the ADMINS settings variable in {{project_name}}/backend/{{project_name}}/settings/base.py
• Change the SERVER_EMAIL to the email address used to send e-mails in {{project_name}}/backend/{{project_name}}/settings/production.py

After completing ALL of the above, remove this Project bootstrap section from the project README. Then follow Running below.

Running

Tools

• Setup editorconfig, ruff and ESLint in the text editor you will use to develop.

Setup

• Do the following:
  • Create a git-untracked local.py settings file: cp backend/{{project_name}}/settings/local.py.example backend/{{project_name}}/settings/local.py
  • Create a git-untracked .env.example file: cp backend/.env.example backend/.env

If you are using Docker:

• Open the backend/.env file on a text editor and uncomment the line DATABASE_URL=postgres://{{project_name}}:password@db:5432/{{project_name}}
• Open a new command line window and go to the project's directory
• Run the initial setup: make docker_setup
• Create the migrations for users app: make docker_makemigrations
• Run the migrations: make docker_migrate
• Run the project: make docker_up
• Access http://localhost:8000 on your browser and the project should be running there
  • When you run make docker_up, some containers are spinned up (frontend, backend, database, etc) and each one will be running on a different port
  • The container with the React app uses port 3000. However, if you try accessing it on your browser, the app won't appear there and you'll probably see a blank page with the "Cannot GET /" error
  • This happens because the container responsible for displaying the whole application is the Django app one (running on port 8000). The frontend container is responsible for providing a bundle with its assets for django-webpack-loader to consume and render them on a Django template
• To access the logs for each service, run: make docker_logs <service name> (either backend, frontend, etc)
• To stop the project, run: make docker_down

Adding new dependencies

• Open a new command line window and go to the project's directory
• Update the dependencies management files by performing any number of the following steps:
  • To add a new frontend dependency, run pnpm add <package name>

    The above command will update your package.json and pnpm-lock.yaml, but won't make the change effective inside the container yet

  • To add a new backend dependency, run docker compose run --rm backend bash to open an interactive shell and then run poetry add {dependency} to add the dependency. If the dependency should be only available for development user append -G dev to the command.
  • After updating the desired file(s), run make docker_update_dependencies to update the containers with the new dependencies

    The above command will stop and re-build the containers in order to make the new dependencies effective

If you are not using Docker:

Setup the backend app

• Open the backend/.env file on a text editor and do one of the following:
  • If you wish to use SQLite locally, uncomment the line DATABASE_URL=sqlite:///db.sqlite3
  • If you wish to use PostgreSQL locally, uncomment and edit the line DATABASE_URL=postgres://{{project_name}}:password@db:5432/{{project_name}} in order to make it correctly point to your database URL
    • The url format is the following: postgres://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/NAME
  • If you wish to use another database engine locally, add a new DATABASE_URL setting for the database you wish to use
    • Please refer to dj-database-url on how to configure DATABASE_URL for commonly used engines
• Set ADMIN_ENVIRONMENT_LABEL to the text you want displayed in the Django admin notice (for example Local, Staging, or Production). If omitted, the admin falls back to the current Django settings module name.
• Optionally set ADMIN_ENVIRONMENT_COLOR and ADMIN_ENVIRONMENT_BACKGROUND_COLOR to customize the notice colors.
• Open a new command line window and go to the project's directory
• Run poetry install

Run the backend app

• Go to the backend directory
• Create the migrations for users app: poetry run python manage.py makemigrations
• Run the migrations: poetry run python manage.py migrate
• Generate the OpenAPI schema: poetry run python manage.py spectacular --color --file schema.yml
• Run the project: poetry run python manage.py runserver

Setup and run the frontend app

• Open a new command line window and go to the project's directory
• pnpm install
• pnpm run openapi-ts
  • This is used to generate the TypeScript client API code from the backend OpenAPI schema
• pnpm run dev
  • This is used to serve the frontend assets to be consumed by django-webpack-loader and not to run the React application as usual, so don't worry if you try to check what's running on port 3000 and see an error on your browser
• Open a browser and go to http://localhost:8000 to see the project running

Setup Celery

• poetry run celery --app={{project_name}} worker --loglevel=info

Setup Redis

• Ensure that Redis is already installed on your system. Once confirmed, run redis-server --port 6379 to start the Redis server.
• If you wish to use Redis for Celery, you need to set the CELERY_BROKER_URL environment variable in the backend/.env file to redis://localhost:6379/0.
  • The /0 at the end of the URL specifies the database number on the Redis server. Redis uses a zero-based numbering system for databases, so 0 is the first database. If you don't specify a database number, Redis will use the first database by default.
  • Note: Prefer RabbitMQ over Redis for Broker, mainly because RabbitMQ doesn't need visibility timeout. See Recommended Celery Django settings for reliability.

Mailhog

• For development, we use Mailhog to test our e-mail workflows, since it allows us to inspect the messages to validate they're correctly built
  • Docker users already have it setup and running once they start the project
  • For non-Docker users, please have a look here for instructions on how to setup Mailhog on specific environments

    The project expects Mailhog SMTP server to be running on port 1025, you may alter that by changing EMAIL_PORT on settings

Testing

make test

Will run django tests using --keepdb and --parallel. You may pass a path to the desired test module in the make command. E.g.:

make test someapp.tests.test_views

Adding new pypi libs

To add a new backend dependency, run poetry add {dependency}. If the dependency should be only available for development user append -G dev to the command.

API Schema and Client generation

We use the DRF-Spectacular tool to generate an OpenAPI schema from our Django Rest Framework API. The OpenAPI schema serves as the backbone for generating client code, creating comprehensive API documentation, and more.

The API documentation pages are accessible at http://localhost:8000/api/schema/swagger-ui/ or http://localhost:8000/api/schema/redoc/.

[!IMPORTANT] Anytime a view is created, updated, or removed, the schema must be updated to reflect the changes. Failing to do so can lead to outdated client code or documentation.

To update the schema, run:

• If you are using Docker: make docker_backend_update_schema
• If you are not using Docker: poetry run python manage.py spectacular --color --file schema.yml

We use the openapi-ts tool to generate TypeScript client code from the OpenAPI schema. The generated client code is used to interact with the API in a type-safe manner.

[!IMPORTANT] Anytime the API schema is updated, the client code must be regenerated to reflect the changes. Failing to do so can lead to type errors in the client code.

To update the client code, run:

• If you are using Docker: make docker_frontend_update_api
• If you are not using Docker: pnpm run openapi-ts

[!NOTE] If pre-commit is properly enabled, it will automatically update both schema and client before each commit whenever necessary.

Github Actions

To enable Continuous Integration through Github Actions, we provide a proj_main.yml file. To connect it to Github you need to rename it to main.yml and move it to the .github/workflows/ directory.

You can do it with the following commands:

mkdir -p .github/workflows
mv proj_main.yml .github/workflows/main.yml

Production Deployment

Setup

This project comes with an render.yaml file, which can be used to create an app on Render.com from a GitHub repository.

Before deploying, please make sure you've generated an up-to-date poetry.lock file containing the Python dependencies. This is necessary even if you've used Docker for local runs. Do so by following these instructions.

After setting up the project, you can init a repository and push it on GitHub. If your repository is public, you can use the following button:

If you are in a private repository, access the following link replacing $YOUR_REPOSITORY_URL$ with your repository link.

• https://render.com/deploy?repo=$YOUR_REPOSITORY_URL$

Keep reading to learn how to configure the prompted environment variables.

ALLOWED_HOSTS

Chances are your project name isn't unique in Render, and you'll get a randomized suffix as your full app URL like: https://{{project_name}}-a1b2.onrender.com.

But this will only happen after the first deploy, so you are not able to properly fill ALLOWED_HOSTS yet. Simply set it to * then fix it later to something like {{project_name}}-a1b2.onrender.com and your domain name like example.org.

ENABLE_DJANGO_COLLECTSTATIC

Default is 1, meaning the build script will run collectstatic during deploys.

AUTO_MIGRATE

Default is 1, meaning the build script will run collectstatic during deploys.

SECRET_KEY

Django requires a SECRET_KEY that is at least 50 characters long and with enough randomness. Render’s generateValue: true produces a shorter value (about 44 characters) that does not meet Django’s security check, so it fails with security.W009.

The correct approach is to declare the variable with sync: false. That way, the SECRET_KEY is not stored in the repository, and the first time the Blueprint is created, Render will prompt you to provide the secret value manually. This ensures the key is long, random, and secure while keeping it outside version control.

You can generate a new key by running the following command on your local machine:

python -c "from django.core.management.utils import get_random_secret_key; print(get_random_secret_key())"

ADMIN_ENVIRONMENT_LABEL

Set this to a short label such as Production, Staging, or Review App. The value is rendered as a persistent notice above the Django admin so staff users can immediately see which environment they are changing.

ADMIN_ENVIRONMENT_COLOR

Controls the notice text color. Defaults to #111827.

ADMIN_ENVIRONMENT_BACKGROUND_COLOR

Controls the notice background color. Defaults to #f59e0b.

Build script

By default, the project will always run the render_build.sh script during deployments. This script does the following:

1. Build the frontend
2. Build the backend
3. Run Django checks
4. Run collectstatic
5. Run Django migrations
6. Push frontend source maps to Sentry

Celery

As there aren't free plans for Workers in Render.com, the configuration for Celery workers/beat will be commented by default in the render.yaml. This means celery won't be available by default.

Uncommenting the worker configuration lines on render.yaml will imply in costs.

SendGrid

To enable sending emails from your application you'll need to have a valid SendGrid account and also a valid verified sender identity. After finishing the validation process you'll be able to generate the API credentials and define the SENDGRID_USERNAME and SENDGRID_PASSWORD environment variables on Render.com.

These variables are required for your application to work on Render.com since it's pre-configured to automatically email admins when the application is unable to handle errors gracefully.

Media storage

Media files integration with S3 or similar is not supported yet. Please feel free to contribute!

Sentry

Sentry is already set up on the project. For production, add SENTRY_DSN environment variable on Render.com, with your Sentry DSN as the value.

You can test your Sentry configuration by deploying the boilerplate with the sample page and clicking on the corresponding button.

Sentry source maps for JS files

The render_build.sh script has a step to push Javascript source maps to Sentry, however some environment variables need to be set on Render.com.

The environment variables that need to be set are:

• SENTRY_ORG - Name of the Sentry Organization that owns your Sentry Project.
• SENTRY_PROJECT_NAME - Name of the Sentry Project.
• SENTRY_API_KEY - Sentry API key that needs to be generated on Sentry. You can find or create authentication tokens within Sentry.

After enabling dyno metadata and setting the environment variables, your next Render.com Deploys will create a release on Sentry where the release name is the commit SHA, and it will push the source maps to it.

Linting

• At pre-commit time (see below)
• Manually with poetry run ruff and pnpm run lint on project root.
• During development with an editor compatible with ruff and ESLint.

Pre-commit hooks

If you are using Docker:

• Not supported yet. Please feel free to contribute!

If you are not using Docker:

• On project root, run poetry run pre-commit install to enable the hook into your git repo. The hook will run automatically for each commit.

Opinionated Settings

Some settings defaults were decided based on Vinta's experiences. Here's the rationale behind them:

DATABASES["default"]["ATOMIC_REQUESTS"] = True

• Using atomic requests in production prevents several database consistency issues. Check Django docs for more details.

• Important: When you are queueing a new Celery task directly from a Django view, particularly with little or no delay/ETA, it is essential to use transaction.on_commit(lambda: my_task.delay()). This ensures that the task is only queued after the associated database transaction has been successfully committed.

  • If transaction.on_commit is not utilized, or if a significant delay is not set, you risk encountering race conditions. In such scenarios, the Celery task might execute before the completion of the request's transaction. This can lead to inconsistencies and unexpected behavior, as the task might operate on a database state that does not yet reflect the changes made in the transaction. Read more about this problem on this article.

CELERY_TASK_ACKS_LATE = True

• We believe Celery tasks should be idempotent. So for us it's safe to set CELERY_TASK_ACKS_LATE = True to ensure tasks will be re-queued after a worker failure. Check Celery docs on "Should I use retry or acks_late?" for more info.

Django-CSP

Django-CSP helps implementing Content Security Policy (CSP) in Django projects to mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by declaring which dynamic resources are allowed to load.

In this project, we have defined several CSP settings that define the sources from which different types of resources can be loaded. If you need to load external images, fonts, or other resources, you will need to add the sources to the corresponding CSP settings. For example:

• To load scripts from an external source, such as https://browser.sentry-cdn.com, you would add this source to CSP_SCRIPT_SRC.
• To load images from an external source, such as https://example.com, you would add this source to CSP_IMG_SRC.

Please note that you should only add trusted sources to these settings to maintain the security of your site. For more details, please refer to the Django-CSP documentation.

Contributing

If you wish to contribute to this project, please first discuss the change you wish to make via an issue.

Check our contributing guide to learn more about our development process and how you can test your changes to the boilerplate.

Commercial Support

This project is maintained by Vinta Software and is used in products of Vinta's clients. We are always looking for exciting work! If you need any commercial support, feel free to get in touch: contact@vinta.com.br