Reactify-Django

Integrating React library for the frontend with the Django backend (by following tutorial)

This repository is a customized version of Reactify-Django, you can follow the tutorial here.

Installation

Since we are integrating Django and React, we need these both installed in our local machine, for django

pip install django

And you can install NodeJS from here. NodeJS gives us the npm(Node Package Manager) and npx(npm execute). We use these for installing and creating node packages.

To check if these installations are working run django-admin and list of all commands will appear and also run npm and then run npx, you should list of commands that you can run, this indicates that you have successfully installed both django and nodejs.

Start Projects

To create django project run,

django-admin startproject reactify .

The trailing . at the end of the command tells django to create all the files and folders of the project inside the current directory.

To create react app run,

npx create-react-app reactify-ui

This will create a seperate folder named reactify-ui with all the react project.

package.json & settings.py

For making things easier for us in the long run and for bigger projects we have to make some changes in our package.json file which is located in the reactify-ui folder, open this file in your text editor and scroll to "scripts", you will find the "build" key there.

npm run build or simply npm build is the command for creating a production ready build folder for the react static files (CSS, JS, Media files).

If you run the above build command inside reactify-ui folder you will find a new folder build is created for you by react which contains another folder static containing CSS, JS, Media folders.

These files are same like django static files which we refer to in django templates with static template tag like this,

{% load static %}
...
<link href="{% static 'css/app.css' %}">
...

These files are served from a folder in local django environment from the STATICFILES_DIRS setting defined in settings.py file.

So the real question is how do you tell django to serve the react build folder files in the templates.

This is where we define some custom react script commands like the ones in this repo in reactify-ui/package.json file.

The npm run collect command defined in the package.json file does four things for us in one command saving a lot of time for using, those things are,

1. Run build command for react files => npm run build
2. Rename the build folder files => npm run build-rename What happens by renaming is that we can easily refer to that file only once rather than changing the file name again after running build command.
3. Copying the build folder files into django's STATICFILES_DIRS folder. npm run copy-buildfiles copies the files into respective folders inside staticfiles folder (we use staticfiles folder)
4. Runs collecstatic command of django which collects these files in STATIC_ROOT folder for production serving.

Organize the files and folders in your machine by referring to this repo and run collect command,

npm run collect

If you get errors that is probably because you don't have two node packages missing namely, renamer and copyfiles, if you figured that out and have installed them, that's cool otherwise install them using npm install --save renamer copyfiles

Run server

Done running collect command, now run the django server, create a home view with root url if not created yet and head over to the server url and you will find the react default project starter page.

Routing

The package that we are gonna be using for handling routes in react is react-router-dom.

There are many other packages which can handle the same thing for us.

So using react-router-dom is very easy. We will be using it to handle post detail page, for example if user clicks on the link of the post from the posts list page we can simply route the browser to the post detail page without reloading the page, all of this just using react and not even touching django except of one place which is to define a url so that django can render the template for that url on its server.

Add a regular expresssion url path reactify/urls.py,

...
from django.urls import path, include, re_path

urlpatterns = [
	...
    re_path(r'^posts/', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='react.html')),
]

re_path is a replacement for url in django which allows us to use regular expressions in urls, the above url will use the template, react.html for every url that starts with posts for example for our local server this url would look like, http://127.0.0.1:8000/posts/ and can also be literally anything after posts http://127.0.0.1:8000/posts/asdfasdfadf.

We are rendering the same template, react.html from templates folder and leaving rest on the react to handle the posts and post detail page or basically view for us.

After adding this url in django urls.py file we will use React to handle the rest.

Install react-router-dom by running,

run this where your package.json file is located.

npm install --save react-router-dom

Now import the necessary modules in reactify-ui/src/App.js file,

import { BrowserRouter, Route, Switch, Redirect } from 'react-router-dom'

And in the place where you use the Posts component tag, replace that line with BrowserRouter

...
	<BrowserRouter>
		<Switch>
			<Route exact path='/posts/' component={Posts} />
			<Route exact path='/posts/:slug/' component={PostDetail} />
			<Route component={Posts} />
		</Switch>
	</BrowserRouter>
...

Before running npm run collect you can remove the PostDetail and just use Posts there since we have not yet created that component, so change that to,

...
	<BrowserRouter>
		<Switch>
			<Route exact path='/posts/' component={Posts} />
			<Route exact path='/posts/:slug/' component={Posts} />
			<Route component={Posts} />
		</Switch>
	</BrowserRouter>
...

Now run npm run collect and go the root url of django and everything works perfectly fine, you get your posts list page.

Go to 127.0.0.1:8000/posts/ and the same component Posts is rendered since we define the exact path for /posts/ with the component Posts.

You can also go to 127.0.0.1:8000/posts/asdfasfd and the same component will be rendered.

PostDetail Component

Now comes the new component which will render out the detail page for post.

Create a new file named PostDetail.js in the posts folder and copy the code from this repo and paste it in your file. code in it.

So what are we doing? We are using the props to check if the match for the exact path posts/:slug/ exists and if it does we are getting that parameter slug from the url and setting that slug in the state and at last rendering it in <h1> tag in the html page.

And for the slug part, we have defined a Route with the path: '/posts/:slug/'. Here :slug is the url parameter that we use like this, const {slug} = this.props.match.params.

Now in the src/App.js file change the Route component to,

<Route exact path='/posts/:slug/' component={PostDetail} />

ofcourse don't forget to import the component,

import PostDetail from './posts/PostDetail'

Now link your post detail page to the posts list by using Link from react-router-dom.

import { Link } from 'react-router-dom'
...
...
		    <h1>
              <Link maintainScrollPosition={false} to={{
                pathname: `/posts/${post.slug}`,
                state: {fromDashboard: false}
              }}>
                {post.title}
              </Link>
            </h1>
              ...

Refer to docs to know more about the Link.

Now run npm run collect and click on the post h1 link and you will be shown the post detail page with the slug without reloading the browser. Now that's cool!