RxDjango

Seamless integration between Django and React

RxDjango is a layer over Django Channels and Django REST Framework aimed to make it as simple as possible to integrate backend and frontend, with performance and minimal latency. On the frontend side, it supports the React framework now, and adapters to other frontend frameworks can be implemented.

Quickstart

This quickstart assumes you have a Django and React application, and on Django side you already have a serializer.

Start by installing RxDjango

pip install rxdjango

RxDjango depends on daphne and channels. Add all these to INSTALLED_APPS, make sure rxdjango comes before daphne, and both come before django.contrib.staticfiles.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # rxdjango must come before daphne, and both before contrib.staticfiles

    'rxdjango',
    'daphne',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',

    # these can come anywhere
    'channels',
]

Set the ASGI_APPLICATION variable

ASGI_APPLICATION = 'your_project.asgi.application'

RxDjango depends on Redis for messaging. Configure REDIS_URL.

REDIS_URL = f'redis://127.0.0.1:6379/0'

RxDjango comes with a native cache system using MongoDB.

MONGO_URL = 'mongodb://localhost:27017/'
MONGO_STATE_DB = 'hot_state'

Typescript interfaces and classes for the frontend to communicate with backend will automatically be generated. For that, you need to configure a directory in your frontend code and the websocket url of your application.

RX_FRONTEND_DIR = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, '../frontend/src/app/modules')
RX_WEBSOCKET_URL = "http://localhost:8000/ws"

This quickstart assumes you already have models and serializers.ModelSerializer class, most likely a nested serializer.

Create a channels.py file, and create a rxdjango.channels.ContextChannels subclass.

from rxdjango.channels import ContextChannel
from myapp.serializers import MyNestedSerializer


class MyContextChannel(ContextChannel):

    class Meta:
        state = MyNestedSerializer()

    def has_permission(self, user, instance):
        # check if user has permission on instance
        return True

Create a route for this channel in asgi/routing.py:

from myapp.channels import MyContextChannel

websocket_urlpatterns = [
    path('ws/myapp/<str:mymodel_id>/', MyContextChannel.as_asgi()),
]

Now run the makefrontend command. It will generate interfaces matching your serializer and a MyContextChannel class in the frontend, with an interface to access the backend.

python manage.py makefrontend

Alternatively, you can pass --makefrontend option to runserver command during development, so frontend files are automatically generated on changes.

python manage.py runserver --makefrontend

Check the files generated inside your modules app. There are interfaces matching your serializer, and a MyContextChannel class on the frontend.

You need to install @rxdjango/react on the frontend. In this example we'll use yarn, use whichever package manager of you choice:

yarn add @rxdjango/react

On your frontend code, link the state of your page with MyContextChannel. The token variable is the token from rest_framework.authtoken.models.Token, the only supported authentication method for now.

import { MyContextChannel } from 'app/modules/myapp.channels';
import { useChannelState } from '@rxdjango/react';

const channel = new MyContextChannel(mymodelId, token);
const state = useChannelState(channel);

That's all it takes, now the state will hold the serialized instance as if done by your nested serializer, and any updates in the database will update your state automatically.

Internally, instances are serialized and cached as flat dictionaries, and signals are used to broadcast instances to clients and cache. The full nested instance is rebuilt on client side for performance. For the signals to work, make sure you use instance.save(), live updates won't work if you use YourModel.objects.update().

Full documentation, that details API and explain channels with multiple instances is on the way.