Django Popular Libraries - A curated List

This article presents a short list of the most popular libraries for Django, a versatile framework suitable for projects of any size, from small websites to large-scale enterprise applications. Django offers excellent documentation, a large and active community, and a vast ecosystem of reusable apps and packages. 

 It includes built-in protection against many common web application vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), and SQL injection.

Django Rest Framework

DRF is a powerful and flexible toolkit for building Web APIs. It's a go-to choice for creating RESTful APIs in Django, offering features like serialization, authentication, and viewsets.

Usage for creating a simple API view:

from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework.response import Response


class HelloWorldView(APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        return Response({"message": "Hello, World!"})

Django Crispy Forms

Django Crispy Forms lets you control the rendering behavior of your Django forms in a very elegant and DRY way. It provides a way to define form layouts programmatically and render them using various CSS frameworks.

Usage of a Crispy Form in a Template:

{% load crispy_forms_tags %}
<form method="post">
    {% csrf_token %}
    {{ form|crispy }}
    <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

Django Debug Toolbar

The Django Debug Toolbar is a configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response and when clicked, display more details about the panel's content.

Configuration in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    'debug_toolbar',
]


MIDDLEWARE = [
    # ...
    'debug_toolbar.middleware.DebugToolbarMiddleware',
]


INTERNAL_IPS = [
    '127.0.0.1',
]

Django Allauth

Django Allauth is an integrated set of Django applications addressing authentication, registration, account management, and third-party (social) account authentication. It provides a unified solution for handling user accounts in Django projects.

Configuration in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'allauth',
    'allauth.account',
    'allauth.socialaccount',
]


AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
    'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
    'allauth.account.auth_backends.AuthenticationBackend',
]


SITE_ID = 1

Django Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It's focused on real-time operation but supports scheduling as well. When integrated with Django, it allows you to run time-consuming Python functions in the background.

Configuration in settings.py:

from celery import Celery


app = Celery('myproject')
app.config_from_object('django.conf:settings', namespace='CELERY')
app.autodiscover_tasks()


@app.task(bind=True)
def debug_task(self):
    print(f'Request: {self.request!r}')

These libraries significantly extend Django's capabilities, enabling developers to build more complex and feature-rich applications with less effort.

For more information related to Django, feel free to access:

• Getting Started with Django - a comprehensive guide for beginners
• Pick a Django Starter and speed up your development