Django documentation¶
Everything you need to know about Django.
First steps¶
Are you new to Django or to programming? This is the place to start!
From scratch: Overview | Installation
Tutorial: Part 1: Requests and responses | Part 2: Models and the admin site | Part 3: Views and templates | Part 4: Forms and generic views | Part 5: Testing | Part 6: Static files | Part 7: Customizing the admin site | Part 8: Adding third-party packages
Advanced Tutorials: How to write reusable apps | Writing your first contribution to Django
Getting help¶
Having trouble? We’d like to help!
Try the FAQ – it’s got answers to many common questions.
Looking for specific information? Try the Index, Module Index or the detailed table of contents.
Not found anything? See FAQ: Getting Help for information on getting support and asking questions to the community.
Report bugs with Django in our ticket tracker.
How the documentation is organized¶
Django has a lot of documentation. A high-level overview of how it’s organized will help you know where to look for certain things:
Tutorials take you by the hand through a series of steps to create a web application. Start here if you’re new to Django or web application development. Also look at the “First steps”.
Topic guides discuss key topics and concepts at a fairly high level and provide useful background information and explanation.
Reference guides contain technical reference for APIs and other aspects of Django’s machinery. They describe how it works and how to use it but assume that you have a basic understanding of key concepts.
How-to guides are recipes. They guide you through the steps involved in addressing key problems and use-cases. They are more advanced than tutorials and assume some knowledge of how Django works.
The model layer¶
Django provides an abstraction layer (the “models”) for structuring and manipulating the data of your web application. Learn more about it below:
Models: Introduction to models | Field types | Indexes | Meta options | Model class
QuerySets: Making queries | QuerySet method reference | Lookup expressions
Model instances: Instance methods | Accessing related objects
Migrations: Introduction to Migrations | Operations reference | SchemaEditor | Writing migrations
Advanced: Managers | Raw SQL | Transactions | Aggregation | Search | Custom fields | Multiple databases | Custom lookups | Query Expressions | Conditional Expressions | Database Functions
Other: Supported databases | Legacy databases | Providing initial data | Optimize database access | PostgreSQL specific features
The view layer¶
Django has the concept of “views” to encapsulate the logic responsible for processing a user’s request and for returning the response. Find all you need to know about views via the links below:
The basics: URLconfs | View functions | Shortcuts | Decorators | Asynchronous Support
Reference: Built-in Views | Request/response objects | TemplateResponse objects
File uploads: Overview | File objects | Storage API | Managing files | Custom storage
Class-based views: Overview | Built-in display views | Built-in editing views | Using mixins | API reference | Flattened index
Advanced: Generating CSV | Generating PDF
Middleware: Overview | Built-in middleware classes
The template layer¶
The template layer provides a designer-friendly syntax for rendering the information to be presented to the user. Learn how this syntax can be used by designers and how it can be extended by programmers:
The basics: Overview
For designers: Language overview | Built-in tags and filters | Humanization
For programmers: Template API | Custom tags and filters | Custom template backend
Forms¶
Django provides a rich framework to facilitate the creation of forms and the manipulation of form data.
The basics: Overview | Form API | Built-in fields | Built-in widgets
Advanced: Forms for models | Integrating media | Formsets | Customizing validation
The development process¶
Learn about the various components and tools to help you in the development and testing of Django applications:
Settings: Overview | Full list of settings
Applications: Overview
Exceptions: Overview
django-admin and manage.py: Overview | Adding custom commands
Testing: Introduction | Writing and running tests | Included testing tools | Advanced topics
Deployment: Overview | WSGI servers | ASGI servers | Deploying static files | Tracking code errors by email | Deployment checklist
The admin¶
Find all you need to know about the automated admin interface, one of Django’s most popular features:
Security¶
Security is a topic of paramount importance in the development of web applications and Django provides multiple protection tools and mechanisms:
Internationalization and localization¶
Django offers a robust internationalization and localization framework to assist you in the development of applications for multiple languages and world regions:
Performance and optimization¶
There are a variety of techniques and tools that can help get your code running more efficiently - faster, and using fewer system resources.
Geographic framework¶
GeoDjango intends to be a world-class geographic web framework. Its goal is to make it as easy as possible to build GIS web applications and harness the power of spatially enabled data.
Common web application tools¶
Django offers multiple tools commonly needed in the development of web applications:
Authentication: Overview | Using the authentication system | Password management | Customizing authentication | API Reference
Other core functionalities¶
Learn about some other core functionalities of the Django framework:
The Django open-source project¶
Learn about the development process for the Django project itself and about how you can contribute:
Community: Contributing to Django | The release process | Team organization | The Django source code repository | Security policies | Mailing lists and Forum
Design philosophies: Overview
Documentation: About this documentation
Third-party distributions: Overview
Django over time: API stability | Release notes and upgrading instructions | Deprecation Timeline
