generator-django-rest

generator-django-rest

A Yeoman generator for a Django REST API (and optionally a React SPA) that makes you efficient, includes features you need in a typical modern web app, yet keeps things simple. You can see an example app bootstrapped in this manner here.

Note: the project is still considered to be in beta until I get a chance to test it on more apps. That said, I am using it in my own projects :)

Features

The philosophy is to include features useful across projects that are tedious to set up from scratch. Some of the cool features are:

• 🚀 quick to launch – start a new project and deploy it to Heroku in 3 commands:

  yo django-rest
  ./scripts/setup.sh
  ./scripts/deploy.sh
  

• ⚡️ productive – start the Django, DB & optionally frontend dev servers easily

  ./scripts/dev.sh
  

• 🐳 Docker support – get a complete environment with Django, Postgres & Redis in a single command:

  docker-compose up
  

• 🦄 modern JS – serve static files on / using django-spa for nice single-page apps using React / Angular / Vue…

• ⚛️ GraphQL – interactive API with filtering and nested queries using Graphene

• ⛵️ monorepo - option to automatically set up a create-react-app frontend for you in the same git repo with everything integrated under the mantra one app, one repo, one dyno

• 📦 Heroku-friendly packaging – if you're using the built-in React frontend, deploy.sh minifies the frontend and packages it up with Django into a separate prod branch ready for deployment as a Django web app (that gets deployed to Heroku by default)

• 🤓 12-factor config – environment variable configuration using django-environ

  • define a variable in .env for dev e.g. REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379/0
  • use it in settings.py, e.g. CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = env('REDIS_URL')
  • set variables on the prod server (just works™ with Redis on Heroku)

• 🔋 batteries included

  • Celery with a Redis backend – cause you'll need an async task queue
  • Backblaze B2 media file storage backend (optional)
  • snapshottest quickly write tests by taking API snapshots.

• 📜 sane logging – defaults to fail nicely

• 🐶 familiar – check out the rough project file layout, it's much like django-admin startproject myproject would set it up (only repeats the project name twice, i.e. ~/code/myproject/myproject/settigns.py). An example generated app is available here.

See CHANGELOG.md for a full release history with all the features.

Getting Started

To begin, you need to install node.js. Once you have that, you need Yeoman pre-installed. Yeoman lives in the npm package repository. You only have to ask for him once, then he packs up and moves into your hard drive.

npm install -g yo

Then, we need the django-rest generator, i.e. plug-in. You install generator-django-rest from npm.

npm install -g generator-django-rest

Finally, for every new project you would initiate the generator in an empty folder.

mkdir myproject
cd myproject
yo django-rest

Now check the HACKING.md file in the generated code project for extra instructions (generated from this template if you're curious).

Contributing

As a reminder to myself, I release a new version of generator-django-rest by running:

npm run release:patch # or :minor or :major
npm publish

License

MIT