Django React Template

Just a proof of concept to integrate Django and React

Concept

We use WebPack to build a django template. Webpack is configured to inject all dependencies these dependencies are built into frontend/static/dist which is collected by python's collectstatic.

NB: We can update the build directory by setting the BUILD_PATH environment variable. So for example if we want to build directly into the global static folder and not use collectstatic we'd set it to

BUILD_PATH=../static/dist

BUILD_PATH is relative to the /frontend folder

Requirements

• Python 3
• Node js installed locally, this might change with the docker thingy
• Yarn

Running

When you run the python server, the root path / is configured to be the React app, so to run you need to install dependencies and build the frontend.

• yarn && yarn build
• python manage.py migrate
• python manage.py runserver And it works, hopefully.

But you will not have hot reload and all those frontend dev goodies. To get those you need to run the webpack dev server which is a matter of yarn && yarn start